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To know the concept of inheritance clearly you must have the idea of class and its features like methods, data members, access controls, constructors, keywords this, super etc.

As the name suggests, inheritance means to take something that is already made. It is one of the most important feature of Object Oriented Programming. It is the concept that is used for reusability purpose. Inheritance is the mechanism through which we can derived classes from other classes. The derived class is called as child class or the subclass or  we can say the extended class and the class from which we are deriving the subclass is called the base class or the parent class. To derive a class in java the keyword extends is used. To clearly understand the concept of inheritance you must go through the following example.

The concept of inheritance is used to make the things from general to more specific e.g. When we hear the word vehicle then we got an image in our mind that it moves from one place to another place it is used for traveling or carrying goods but the word vehicle does not specify whether it is two or three or four wheeler because it is a general word. But the word car makes a more specific image in mind than vehicle, that the car has four wheels . It concludes from the example that car is a specific word and vehicle is the general word. If we think technically  to this example then vehicle is the super class (or base class or parent class) and car is the subclass or child class because every car has the features of it’s parent (in this case vehicle) class.

The following kinds of inheritance are there in java.

• Simple Inheritance
• Multilevel Inheritance

Tags: Inheritance in Java, Java Extends, Java Inheritance, Multilevel Inheritance, Simple Inheritance