Core Java for the Impatient, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4

Inheritance and Reflection

Topics in This Chapter

• 4.1 Extending a Class

• 4.2 Inheritance Hierarchies

• 4.3 Object: The Cosmic Superclass

• 4.4 Enumerations

• 4.5 Runtime Type Information and Resources

• 4.6 Reflection

• Exercises

The preceding chapters introduced you to classes and interfaces. In this chapter, you will learn about another fundamental concept of object-oriented programming: inheritance. Inheritance is the process of creating new classes that are built on existing classes. When you inherit from an existing class, you reuse (or inherit) its methods, and you can add new methods and fields.

Note

Instance variables and static variables ...