Purpose of private? + Return Statements

You want to use private when other classes will be using the respective class; this is where getter methods come in. The getter and setter methods prevents other classes from making unwanted changes to your instance variables and other data.

Return statement is what is returned from a method that doesn't have void in the method heading. public static void main doesn't return anything because of the word void in the heading; if I was to write:

public int findNumber()

The compiler would be looking for a return statement that would return the int that is specified in the heading since it doesn't have void there. You can return any kind of data type- you just need to specify that type in replacement of the "void" in your method heading.

I hope this makes sense to you.

An easy way to look at it. when you get more advanced. Say your creating a video game and the objective is for the main character to slay a dragon and the max life of the character is 100, You wouldn't the user to be able to to keep raising his health so he wouldn't die, so you would set that object to private so he wouldnt have access to it.

If you have a class that has an instance variable set to private and you instantiate an object from that class you can only access it to the extent that the program will allow.

When a programmer is designing a class he knows how much access will be needed to execute the program; if he grants too much access to the person using the class for their program they could end up causing the program to behave in unusual ways so the private variable is given to limit how much access the user has.

At times you will find yourself importing libraries at the start of your program so you can access the classes and use them in your program; and you will see that the only way to use a portion of the class is to use a get() or set() method; this is because if you could access it in a public way you could easily change the values of the variables which would then cause that class to behave differently. One example would be an int count variable- if this variable was made public and it was only meant to be incremented by 1 then user could go in an say: count = 10; So now the program has been modified in an unexpected way. This is what encapsulation is all about- tying up any loose ends in your code.