Java™ How to Program, Seventh Edition

9.9. Wrap-Up

This chapter introduced inheritance—the ability to create classes by absorbing an existing class’s members and embellishing them with new capabilities. You learned the notions of superclasses and subclasses and used keyword extends to create a subclass that inherits members from a superclass. The chapter introduced the access modifier protected; subclass methods can access protected superclass members. You learned how to access superclass members with super. You also saw how constructors are used in inheritance hierarchies. Finally, you learned about the methods of class Object, the direct or indirect superclass of all classes in Java.

In Chapter 10, Object-Oriented Programming: Polymorphism, we build on our discussion of inheritance ...