Polymorphism(also called dynamic binding or late binding or run-time binding) is an essential concept in OOP. This chapter is basically a more detailed explanation of polymorphism, which is highly relevant to inheritance. (As mentioned in chapter 7, in many cases inheritance is meaningless when polymorphism is not necessary.)
OOP
There are 3 posts tagged OOP (this is page 1 of 1).
TIJ chapter 5: Initialization and Cleanup
This chapter is really the beginning of OOP. I think Java is really designed with the concept of OOP. Even those process oriented programming elements are forced to be absorbed in that systems and become static element. If in one day, which may not be too far away, OOP are no longer popular, Java would either.
Ironically, we always had to have some place to start up a program, and that place can’t be an non-static method, at which no object has been created since it is the beginning. So, the starting point is always a static method, either main() method or something else in JUnit or things like that. In that static method, we can call other static methods or create new objects and run non-static method on that. However, every static method cannot go beyond classes.
Thinking in Java Chapter 1&2: Object
After one year of programing with Java, I am gradually familiar with OOP. Learning java for me, whose first programming language is C, was much more than change the name system, like field, method, reference, etc. It is almost a renewal of concept. Although so, my knowledge of Java was founded from all kinds of sources, and a book like Thinking in Java seems useful for me to introduce systematically introduce the thought behind Java.
It is important to design classes appropriately. For people who is not familiar with OOP, it can easily happen that use classes as structs and designs methods as “functions” in the outer classes. Abusing inheritance may also be a popular mistake. When the relationship between classes is “have-a”, one should use composition(or aggregation when dynamically). We should also think about it whether the relationship is “is-a” or “is-like-a”. For the former one, we may only override methods of base class, while the latter one may involves implicating new methods. When we upcasting objects to their base classes types, only methods we use substitution can be called. Otherwise, we will have to downcast the reference to call the unique methods. Although so, both the two models are useful, and the choice will be obvious for certain problems.