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

Class Scope

Static variables have class scope—they can be used in all of the class’s methods. We can access a class’s public static members through a reference to any object of the class, or by qualifying the member name with the class name and a dot (.), as in Math.random(). A class’s private static class members can be accessed by client code only through methods of the class. Actually, static class members exist even when no objects of the class exist—they’re available as soon as the class is loaded into memory at execution time. To access a public static member when no objects of the class exist (and even when they do), prefix the class name and a dot (.) to the static member, as in Math.PI. To access a private static member when no objects ...