Java Term of the Week: Inheritance

Seeing as the last few articles on object-oriented programming have focused on what inheritance is and how it can be used in Java, it seems a good time to recap on inheritance for the Java term of the week.

Inheritance is a way of defining an "is-a" relationship between a class and a more specialized version of that class. For example, if a Student class extends a Person class, then it should be the case that Student is-a Person. The subclass Student builds on the functionality of the superclass Person.