This chapter continues the examination of classes and objects from Chapter 7. We now have enough skills to do a surprising number of things in Java. There are few real programs you will encounter, however, that do not make use of the advanced concepts that we will address in this chapter. These include inheritance, interfaces, abstract classes and methods , and reflection.
It is important that you feel you have a pretty good grasp of the concepts from earlier chapters, because things get rather more complicated in this chapter. What the object-oriented concepts presented here open up, however, is a very rich world.
Trying out the code examples, modifying them, and trying them again is a good idea. It can seem like a lot of terminology that is difficult to remember at this point, and the difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that so many of the concepts are hopelessly intertwined with the other concepts. So we will just pretend we didn't know it was supposed to be hard, and we'll work through each concept step by step.
Once we get to the end of this chapter, you will really understand the fundamentals of the Java programming language and related object-oriented concepts. The remainder of the book will simply be learning further implementation of the concepts outlined so far. For instance, dealing with I/O, JDBC (Java database connectivity), and servlets are just different things that these concepts make available. So while that means that these concepts are very important to understand, it also means that it gets much easier after this. And the difficulty may really be in keeping the terminology straight.
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