Unit 9 & 10: Inheritance & Recursion

• inheritance: the process where one class acquires the properties (methods and fields) of another. With the use of inheritance the information is made manageable in a hierarchical order.
• Superclass: A parent class that contains common attributes and behaviors used by subclasses (children).
• Subclass: A child class that inherits attributes and behaviors from a superclass (parent).
• Is A: A relationship between two items that represent a superclass / subclass relationship
• Has A: A relationship between two items that represents an instance variable relationship.
• Super: A Java keyword used to refer to the superclass object. In this lesson we saw it used to call the superclass constructor.
• Method overriding: When a child class overwrites a method inherited from a parent class. Methods have the same name and same parameters.
• polymorphism: the capability of a method to do different things depending on the object it is acting upon.
• compile time: describes a task that is or can be done by the compiler,

  without running the program.
• run time: the state of an application while it is running
• object superclass: The Object class is the superclass of all other classes in Java.
• Recursion 


  An iterative process where a method calls itself.
• Base Case: The simplest version of our recursive process. This is the point when the problem cannot be reduced any further.
• Sequential/Linear Search: A search technique that starts at the first element and goes through each element until it finds the target value.
• Binary Search: A search that starts at the middle of a sorted array or ArrayList and eliminates half of the array or ArrayList in each iteration until the desired value is found or all elements have been eliminated.