Summary

This chapter described how to create derived classes from a base class. It also showed the advantages that you gain from using derived classes when they are appropriate. Finally, this chapter discussed the various access specifiers that you can use to fine-tune how the base and derived classes interact with each other.

Inheritance is a topic that seems a bit intimidating at first. If you feel that way, you should spend a little time reviewing this chapter and writing some sample derived classes of your own. The intimidation will soon dissolve, and you'll throw rocks at any language that doesn't support inheritance.