The Waite Group's C++ Primer Plus, Third Edition

Summary

Inheritance enables you to adapt programming code to your particular needs by defining a new class (a derived class) from an existing class (the base class). Public inheritance models an is-a relationship, meaning a derived-class object also should be a kind of base-class object. As part of the is-a model, a derived class inherits the data members and most methods of the base class. However, a derived class doesn't inherit the base class constructors, destructor, and assignment operator. A derived class can access the public and protected members of the base class directly and the private base class members via the public and protected base-class methods. You then can add new data members and methods to the class, and you can use the ...