Summary

This chapter started with an introduction to OOP. Portability, inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism were deemed to be the primary benefits of OOP and were explored. A sample OOP class was examined in detail. That class, the Bicycle class, was used to demonstrate key OOP concepts to include instance variables, the this reference, accessors, mutators, driver class, constructors, overloading, and method call chaining. The chapter ended with a look at key OOP principles—create concise objects, encapsulate to protect, and purposeful inheritance. 

In the next chapter, Behavioral Design Patterns, we will explore the behavioral design pattern category and its individual design patterns of chain of responsibility, mediator, memento, null object, observer, state, strategy, template method, and visitor. We will examine the programming challenges and design patterns that resolve them.