Lesson: Classes and Objects
With the knowledge you now have of the basics of
the Java programming language, you can learn to write your own
classes. In this
lesson,
you will find information
about defining your own classes, including declaring
member variables, methods, and constructors.
You will learn to use your classes to create objects, and how to use the objects you create.
This
lesson
also covers nesting classes
within other classes, enumerations, and annotations.
This section shows you the anatomy of a class, and how
to declare fields, methods, and constructors.
This section covers creating and using objects. You will learn how to instantiate an object, and,
once instantiated, how to use the dot operator to access the object's instance variables and methods.
This section covers more aspects of classes that depend on using object references and the dot operator
that you learned about in the preceding section:
returning values from methods, the this keyword, class vs. instance members, and access control.
Static nested classes, inner classes, anonymous inner
classes, and local classes are covered.
This section covers enumerations, specialized classes that allow you to define and use sets of constants.
Annotations allow you to add information to your program that is not actually part of the program. This section
describes three built-in annotations that you should know about.
