Inheritance is one of the core principles of object-oriented programming (OOP), which help us derive a class from another class or a hierarchy of classes that share a set of attributes and methods. In other words, it is a relationship between a superclass (a more generalised class) and a subclass (a more specialised class), where the subclass inherits data and behavior from the superclass.

In Java, abstraction is implemented using abstract class and interface, which are two categories in Java with different rules and properties. An abstract class appears similar to any other class, but it is declared with the abstract keyword, and one can never instantiate an abstract class.

Learning Object-Oriented Programming is essential for modern software development as it introduces many features such as Inheritance, Encapsulation, Abstraction, and Polymorphism. Besides reducing code complexity, the oops provide other advantages like code modularity, code reusability, code extensibility, data hiding, etc.

The word “interface” means a medium or means of communication between two entities. Similarly, in Java, interfaces are used to ease the communication between various classes. An interface looks similar to any class and contains only constants, method signatures, default methods, and static methods.

In OOP, Polymorphism allows us to code to an interface and has multiple implementations, making the program better. In Java, there are two types of polymorphism: Compile-time and Runtime polymorphism. The first type is implemented with method overloading, and the second one is implemented via method overriding.

In C++, there are a few differences between structure and class based on their definition and use cases. One major difference is that the structure members and base classes are public by default, and the members and base classes of a class are private by default.

Operator overloading is a compile-time polymorphism in C++ that allows us to make operators work for user-defined data types as objects and structures. In other words, we can extend the meaning of an operator to operate on a user-defined data type.

Java language has a feature called method overloading, which allows multiple methods within a class to have the same name with different argument lists. It is a type of polymorphism (the process by which we can perform a single task in various ways). To be more concise, overloading is an example of static polymorphism.

In oops, we may want our object to get initialized with some specific properties, or we may need to do some operations every time an object is instantiated. To do such things, we use constructors. In simple words, a constructor is defined inside the class that contains the code to instantiate the class object.

A class is a user-defined blueprint that describes what a specific kind of object will look like, but an object is an instance of a class, which contains data and methods working on that data. In simple words, classes and objects are the fundamental building blocks of Object-Oriented Programming (OOPS).

In OOPS, Abstraction exposes necessary functionality to external objects and hides implementation details. This helps programmers to use complex logic without understanding its implementation. In other words, Abstraction is a process of exposing relevant functionalities so that one needs to know what the code does, not how it does it.

Encapsulation is one of the fundamental concepts in OOP that bundles data and associated methods that operate on that data into a single block called class. It is also a pathway for restricting direct access to some data and methods associated with a class (which leads to data hiding).

Object-Oriented Programming binds together the data and the methods in the form of an object and selectively exposes the data to other objects. It primarily revolves around classes and objects, i.e., their definition, instantiation, relationship, communication, etc. It helps us to organize code and development processes for large-scale software.

Learn the four pillars of object-oriented programming: Abstraction, Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Polymorphism.

This blog has discussed critical C++ concepts related to dangling pointers, bad pointers, memory leak, static memory, dynamic memory, reference variable, const and volatile keywords, template, etc.