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.