Chapter 11: Classes, The Rest of the Story

OVERVIEW

Before reading this chapter, the reader should review the discussion in Chapter 3 on simple classes in C++ and Java. The reader would also benefit from a quick review of other class-related concepts we have already discussed in the earlier chapters.

In particular, we have already discussed the issues of declaration, definition, and initialization of class types in Chapter 7, where we also talked about the no-arg constructors for classes and the role such constructors play in the initialization of array and other container types in C++. The member initialization syntax that must be used for a constructor if a C++ class has const or reference data members was also covered in Chapter 7.

A review of Chapter 9 where we talk about class-type arguments for functions, overloading of member functions and constructors, and so on, for both C++ and Java would also prove helpful to the reader in understanding the material in this chapter.