Reviews : Java Books :
Beginning Java Objects : Chapters 2 and 3

Buy this book Title: Beginning Java Objects ISBN: 1861004176 US Price: $ 39.99 Canadian Price: C$ 59.95 UK Price: £ 28.99 Publication Date: November 2000 Pages: 800 © Wrox Press Limited, US and UK.

Encapsulation

Encapsulation is a formal term referring to the mechanism that bundles together the state information (attributes) and behavior (methods) of an object into a single logical unit. Everything that we need to know about a given student is, in theory, contained within the 'walls' of the student object, either directly as an attribute of that object or indirectly as a method that can answer a question or make a determination about the object's state.

Encapsulation is not unique to OO languages, but in some senses is perfected by them. For those of you familiar with C, you know that:

A C struct(ure) encapsulates data:

struct employee {
char name[30];
int age;
}

and a C function encapsulates logic — data is passed in, operated on, and an answer is optionally returned:

float average(float x, float y) {
return (x + y)/2.0;
}

But only with OO programming languages is the notion of encapsulating data and behavior in a single construct called a class, to represent an abstraction of a real-world entity, truly embraced.

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