Introduction
Content Note
Much of the content in this chapter was adapted from Nathan Bean’s CIS 400 course at K-State, with the author’s permission. That content is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
A signature aspect of object-oriented languages is (as you might expect from the name), the existence of objects within the language. In this chapter, we take a deep look at objects, exploring why they were created, what they are at both a theoretical and practical level, and how they are used.
Key Terms
Some key terms to learn in this chapter are:
- Encapsulation
- State
- Class
- Object
- Field
- Attribute
- Method
- Property
- Public
- Private
- Static
To begin, we’ll examine the term encapsulation.