When you hear the word “inheritance”, code may not be the first thing that springs to mind; you’re probably more likely to think of inheriting genetic traits, like eye color from your mother or a smile from your grandfather. But inheritance is also an important feature of object-oriented programming in Java.

Suppose we are building a Shape class in Java. We might give it some points in 2D, a method for calculating the area, and another method for displaying the shape. But what happens if we want a class for a triangle that has some triangle-specific methods? Do we need to redefine all of the same methods that we created for Shape?

No! (Phew.) Lucky for us, a Java class can also inherit traits from another class. Because a Triangle is a Shape, we can define Triangle so that it inherits fields and methods directly from Shape. The object-oriented principle of inheritance saves us the headache of redefining the same class members all over again.

There are several terms you’ll encounter frequently:

• Parent class, superclass, and base class refer to the class that another class inherits from (like Shape).
• Child class, subclass, and derived class refer to a class that inherits from another class (like Triangle).