OOPS Concepts 101: What Are the Key Concepts You Need to Know?
Object-Oriented Programming System (OOPS) is a programming paradigm built around the concept of objects — self-contained units that represent real-world entities like users, cars, or bank accounts. While objects are at the heart of OOPS, they are just one part of a broader system of concepts that define how OOP works. Together, these OOPS concepts (like classes, objects, methods, etc) concepts — form the building blocks of modular and efficient software development.
In this blog, we won’t dive into the four pillars of OOPS — Abstraction, Encapsulation, Polymorphism, and Inheritance — just yet. Instead, we’ll focus on some of the foundational Java concepts that are essential for understanding OOPS.
These include objects, classes, constructors, methods, access modifiers, etc — the building blocks of any Java program and the building blocks of OOPS as the four pillars use them to make our code modular, maintainable and flexible. Let’s revisit these concepts with a practical mindset and some real-world examples to see how they truly work
Let’s start…
Different OOPS Concepts in Java
As mentioned earlier, in this blog we’ll focus on some of the core concepts of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), which are essential for writing clean and effective code in Java. Without a solid understanding of these OOPS concepts, it’s hard to fully appreciate the power of OOP and use it to make our code modular, flexible, and secure.
In this post, we’ll concentrate on five key concepts: classes, objects, methods, access modifiers, and constructors. While there are many other important OOP concepts, we’ve chosen these because they are especially relevant for beginners for will help them understand OOP better. The more advanced topics will be covered in future posts, as they require a deeper conceptual understanding.
Among these five, we’ll be creating separate blog posts for constructors and access modifiers, since they deserve a more detailed explanation. Understanding them is crucial both from a conceptual standpoint and for practical coding in Java.
Class
A class is a blueprint of an object or rather a blueprint that is used to create an object as it tells us which properties and methods will that object or objects of similar kind have. As Java likes to work on the DRY principle.
