Chapter 8. More OOP—Extending Classes

  • Inheritance

  • Polymorphism

  • The Class Whose Name Is Class

  • Exercises

  • Some Light Relief—The Nerd Detection System

We now come to the main part of object-oriented programming, covering inheritance and polymorphism. Despite the unusual names, they describe some clean concepts. You need a solid understanding of inheritance and polymorphism to program in an object-oriented language and to use some of the Java library routines.

As we have seen several times, inheritance means basing a new class on a class that is already defined. The new class will extend the existing class in some way. Just as inheritance in real life is “what you get from a parent,” inheritance in OOP is “what you get from a parent ...

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