Summary

This chapter introduced you to the core of object-oriented programming—the creation of classes and those operations which can be performed with them, such as extending them, using them to override parts of the code, or creating local instances.

The examples provided here showed you the importance of creating classes to better structure your code and improve it economically. If there are several classes within a specific context, it is very likely that they will have common characteristics that could be described in a parent class or even an interface.

A part of the chapter was dedicated to operations done with the compiler. As a developer, you may want to inform others when certain parts of your code will be deprecated, or whether a method from a specific class has been overridden. Annotating code is a good technique for maintaining communication with others. You also saw how to turn off possible warnings coming from annotations that occurred during development.

Finally, we discussed the process of documentation. This is relevant when sharing code or passing it over to other people. In the next chapter, we will take a look at Java collections framework which will simplify your dealings with complex data structures.