General question

Hi there,

It looks like you're on the section about objects - they let you create a sort of blueprint for a collection of methods and attributes that you might want to reuse. In the first examples, it might not be obvious why it's necessary, but they get really useful in more complicated programs.

Now, to your questions - when you make the code for a class, you aren't actually creating the object itself - just the blueprint for it. You create the actual object when you declare a 'new' one, which is happening there. The benefit of this is that you could create more than one if you wanted to - each of those would be an "instance" of that object.

Get methods and 'public'/'private' go hand-in-hand. Public and private helps you to determine the scope of your attributes and methods - scoping is a really important part of program design. If, for example, everything in an object is freely accessible from anywhere in the program, you could run into unexpected conflicts or behaviors as things get more complicated. Scoping allows you to control exactly how the class and its attributes can be affected by the rest of the program. Classes can also be reused in other applications and by other programmers - your scoping can help to communicate to others (or to yourself in the future) how the class is meant to be used. "Public" means it can be accessed from anywhere in the program, and "private" means it can only be accessed from within that object.

It's generally good practice to keep the actual attributes private, and provide public methods to access them. That's where your 'getters' and 'setters' come in - these are usually public methods that allow the retrieval or modification of a value. You can control how the attributes can be changed or viewed from outside the class through these methods. At the same time, you'll probably have other methods that are public or private depending on what they do.

I hope this helps!