Java™ How to Program, Seventh Edition

9.3. protected Members

Chapter 8 discussed access modifiers public and private. A class’s public members are accessible wherever the program has a reference to an object of that class or one of its subclasses. A class’s private members are accessible only from within the class itself. A superclass’s private members are not inherited by its subclasses. In this section, we introduce access modifier protected. Using protected access offers an intermediate level of access between public and private. A superclass’s protected members can be accessed by members of that superclass, by members of its subclasses and by members of other classes in the same package (i.e., protected members also have package access).

All public and protected superclass members ...