Exercises

Look around you at some of the physical objects in your workspace and see if you can describe them in an inheritance hierarchy. Humans have been dividing the world into taxonomies like this for centuries, so it shouldn't be difficult. Are there any non-obvious inheritance relationships between classes of objects? If you were to model these objects in a computer application, what properties and methods would they share? Which ones would have to be polymorphically overridden? What properties would be completely different between them?

Now write some code. No, not for the physical hierarchy; that's boring. Physical items have more properties than methods. Just think about a pet programming project you've wanted to tackle in the past year, but never gotten around to. For whatever problem you want to solve, try to think of some basic inheritance relationships and then implement them. Make sure that you also pay attention to the sorts of relationships that you actually don't need to use...