Learning to Program in C++

Taking Stock

Now let's start on our first class definition, which is designed to help solve the problem of maintaining inventory in a small grocery store. We need to keep track of all the items that we carry, so we're going to define a class called StockItem. The StockItem class, like other classes, is composed of a number of functions and variables. As I suggested earlier, to make this more concrete, think of something like Lego™ blocks, which you can put together to make parts that can in turn be used to build bigger structures. The smallest Legos are the native types, and the bigger, composite ones are class types.

For the compiler to be able to define an object correctly, we'll have to tell it the names and types of the member variables ...