You really need to remember only five things to understand 90 percent of the theory of object
orientation:
• An object is anything that provides a way to locate, access, modify, and secure data;
• A class is a description of what data is accessible through a particular kind of object, and
how that data may be accessed;
• A method is the means by which an object’s data is accessed, modified, or processed;
• Inheritance is the way in which existing classes of object can be upgraded to provide additional
data or methods;
• Polymorphism is the way that distinct objects can respond differently to the same message,
depending on the class to which they belong.