C++ Classes.

     Helllooo.... Readers... Welcome to inspire++. How are you my technical nerdy followers. The week before Last week was awesome. Thanks to the seniors from mechatronics.. We had a awesome workshop on robotics.. All the circuits, cool robots, drones you presented, the actual circuits we created using arduino boards most importantly the programming challenges you gave us !!! Truly seniors!! You did great. That was a day to remember.. :) 
That been said.. Owkayy!! Lets Jump in to the lesson today!!

Classes.

     The main purpose of C++ programming is to add object orientation to the C programming language and classes are the central feature of C++ that supports object-oriented programming and are often called user-defined types.

     Last week we talked what are objects. An object is an entity (Real world thing). In programming , an object is a thing either from the perspective of the user of the software or the programmer. 

     * Object has two components, Properties and Behaviors.

     Classes on the other hand known as blueprints (Plans) of objects. It's just like house planing. You build a house according to the plan. You can build as many houses as you want using the same plan, if you want to. For each house, you don't want to make a new plan. 

     In a program when you want to create an object, first what you have to do is create a class of that object. Then use the name of that class to create objects.

     For example , think you have to make a software to a company to record the details about their customers. So a customer has a name , company gives him a customer ID, From when this person is a customer of the company..etc, And the customer buy things , customer may be given a discount by company. 

     Ok.. When you look at this scene what you have to keep in mind is that there are more than one customer in a company (more than 1000 maybe). So you have to see that there is a pattern. The best thing to do is take all the common factors of each customer and make it an object. Means, Create a object to the customer.

     Right! , to create an object what we have to do is, as I mentioned earlier , create a class. Ok.. Now what I'm going to do is , create a class called customer. Let's see how to do that.

First Create the class.

     Then type the keyword public inside the class.

Look!! There is a Colon : after public!! (Not a semi Colon!! ; ) 

     Under public , define all the variables you want.

Ok! We have finished creating the class. Now it's time to create an object using that class (plan). Here's how you do it. 
     In main function, type the class name and leave a space ,and give a new name to your object (C1). 

Then here's how you use the properties of that object.

Did you got the idea. Ok! Just like that we can create any amount of objects we want.

See how simple the idea is. OK.. Now I want you to practice this concept. So here are some examples. I will give you the answers in the next post.

Practice:

     Create a Class named Box. Add variables Height , width , breadth. Create three Box objects in main function using that class. Give different values to the each object. Write a program to print the volumes of each box.

See you guys soon. Bye bye..!! :)

OOP :o :o :p (What is OOP , Why we want it)

     Hello Fellow Readers..  Welcome to inspire++ :) This post is specially for the people who are doing OOP now. Don't get confuse with this post , because we are still on the VARIABLES in our fundamental programming post series. OOP is a big set of lessons, so we have to do this also as a post series. This series will be continue parallel to our fundamental post series. OK... that being said..
Lets start..  

     When you have to create a big program , I mean really really big one , big enough to call it a software , we will have to do more and more coding. Sometimes we will have to re-type the same set of code-lines again and again. 

     This seems to be a big head-aching situation. So, as smart engineers what are the options do we have to do to reduce the time for coding and to reduce the pain occur when doing the same thing again and again.? 

     Well you might have the answer already. "C n P" or AKA Copy and Paste Method Right!! You type the set of code , copy it and paste wherever you want them to be in your source code. Easy!! 

     BUT!! it is not a wise method to follow for some Reasons. Imagine if there is an error or a Bug in your code , when you copy that set of codes to 20 different places in your source code , you will have the same error in 20 times and you will have to fix it 20 times repeatedly.  And imagine how your source code will look like. It will be very very long and it'll be really hard to keep working with .

1. Duplicate code is a Bad Thing.
2. More codes - Hard to work with. 

     So there is a big problem that haven't answered properly. Purpose of this post is to tell you how to solve this problem by introducing you the Concept of OOP-Object Oriented Programming. By the end of this post you will have an idea about what is OOP and Why we want it.

     Can you remember the lesson functions..Well in our Fundamental post series we haven't arrived that point yet, but I guess you guys have the idea of what is a function and how to use it..

     So in short, A function is a set of codes in your source code with a given name. It exist parallel to our main function. It does not do anything until we call it. Whenever we want we simply call the function in main function. 
     
     So instead of typing or copying the same set of code again and again in main function , we can create a function and call it when we want to execute them. This method is call function calling. So if there is any error in our code we only have to fix it in the function and whole program will fixed automatically. No need to fix same error 20 different places. 

     This concept is very helpful when understanding OOP. In software developing we use a developed version of this concept. Instead of using functions we use Classes and Objects  in OOP (Object Oriented Programming.) 

     By using Classes & Objects We Can,

1.      Reduce duplicating codes.
2.      Reduce the number of code lines in your main       function.

     And the whole program will become a User friendly neat and logical thing and it will be easy to work with. OK I think now you have an idea about why we want OOP right!!

     In OOP we create Classes - AKA the blueprints of the objects - Classes have Properties and Behaviors. And we create Objects (Real world things) using codes, and to make those objects feel real we encapsulate them, use inheritance and polymorphism to use them in advance. So as a terminology you can refer those red color words , those words will be the topics of our next posts. So stay with inspire++ to get a fully understand about OOP. Thank you guys..!! C U.. :) 
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