What is encapsulation? Among the many good answers that can be easily found around the web, the one given by the software engineer Edward V. Berard is perhaps the most exhaustive one:
The concept of encapsulation as used in an object-oriented context is not essentially different from its dictionary definition. It still refers to building a capsule, in the case a conceptual barrier, around some collection of things.
The quote comes from the "Abstraction, Encapsulation, and Information Hiding article by Edward V. Berard." The whole article text can be found at http://www.tonymarston.co.uk/php-mysql/abstraction.txt.
When thinking about encapsulation in object-oriented programming, the best example we can come up with is probably ...
