I can't discern the difference between method and object

Greg;

Welcome to Treehouse! Great question, let me see if I can shed some light on things without causing too much confusion.

To attempt to over simplify things for explanation purposes, there are three general things you need to grasp in object oriented programming.

1) Classes,

2) Methods, or sometimes called functions, and

3) Objects

A class is like a blue print for an object. Let's say that we make a class called dog. There are lots of dogs, and although there are differences, they all follow the same design pattern. However, if you have a specific dog, that is an object. This one dog can be petted, it is real, it is not the blue prints but something that you can work with.

Methods allow you to define what the object does or can be done to it. So, you could have a pet() method for your dog object, a bark() method, a tailWag() method, etc. In our example when we create a dog object in our code we would want to assign it a name at creation, make sense? That way we can make each dog have different attributes and keep track of them.

In code we would do something like:

public class Dog {     // Define our class

  // Define our variables
  private String mDogName;


  public Dog(String dogName) {      // define a method
       mDogName = dogName;          // sets our dog's name to the name passed in when we create a new dog object
  }

}

Great! We can now create as many dog objects we want and name them in our code with Dog("Fido") or Dog("Rover"). We would generally assign meaningful names to our dog objects as well along the lines of:

Dog fido = new Dog("Fido");
Dog rover = new Dog("Rover");

For what sounds like your main question then, looking at the previous code, Java will create new dog objects Fido and Rover and assign their respective names based on the method we declared inside our class Dog. That is what objects are, something you can use or do something to, they are "real".

Methods, as I said earlier, are something you do to your objects. Let's say that in our Dog class we create another method like so:

public boolean pet() {
     mDogIsHappy = true;
     return mDogIsHappy;
}

Assuming that our variables are assigned, etc. we could now call a method on our dog object and have our dog be happy, right? We would do that with:

fido.pet();

We can obviously do much more (use more methods) than just pet our dog and we can assign it more properties (change our object) than name, but hopefully that helps a bit.

Please post back if you are still confused.

Ken