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

Summary

C++ provides several means for reusing code. Public inheritance, described in Chapter 12, enables you to model is-a relationships, with derived classes being able to reuse the code of base classes. Private and protected inheritance also let you reuse base class code, this time modeling has-a relationships. With private inheritance, public and protected members of the base class become private members of the derived class. With protected inheritance, public and protected members of the base class become protected members of the derived class. Thus, in either case, the public interface of the base class becomes an internal interface for the derived class. This sometimes is described as inheriting the implementation but not the interface, ...