The Object-Oriented Thought Process

4. The Anatomy of a Class

In previous chapters we have covered the fundamental object-oriented (OO) concepts and determined the difference between the interface and the implementation. No matter how well you think out the problem of what should be an interface and what should be part of the implementation, the bottom line always comes down to how useful the class is and how it interacts with other classes. A class should never be designed in a vacuum, for as might be said, no class is an island. When objects are instantiated, they almost always interact with other objects. An object can also be part of another object or be part of an inheritance hierarchy.

This chapter examines a simple class and then takes it apart piece by piece along with ...