Java™ How To Program (Early Objects), Tenth Edition

8.1 Introduction

We now take a deeper look at building classes, controlling access to members of a class and creating constructors. We show how to throw an exception to indicate that a problem has occurred (Section 7.5 discussed catching exceptions). We use the this keyword to enable one constructor to conveniently call another constructor of the same class. We discuss composition—a capability that allows a class to have references to objects of other classes as members. We reexamine the use of set and get methods. Recall that Section 6.10 introduced the basic enum type to declare a set of constants. In this chapter, we discuss the relationship between enum types and classes, demonstrating that an enum type, like a class, can be declared in ...