Thread: Just a few basic questions

Ive been programming for about a couple of months now. All self taught. I'd probably consider myself as an intermediate/advanced Java programmer. But I still have some questions that I seem to never understand the answer.

Firstly, one of my questions is... what is an object??? I cannot believe that I don't know what an object is despite me creating calculators, games, softwares that finds out a maths solution (I created my own SUVAT solver, for those of you who do mechanics will be familiar with this). Anyways yeah, I have no idea what an object is. I just know from instinct now when to create one and when to use one. The way I think of it is that it's like a key, its a key to access and use methods and variables from a different class. Would you agree to that definition? Ive searched online and ive been getting answers like 'it has a behaviour and a state' and sometimes people somehow bring animals in the definition of an object like, 'dog is an object, it has 2 ears and 4 legs' and I'm like... what are you on about?!

Secondly, I have this idea for an android app but I'm not sure whether I am ready to try it out. It is pretty complex to make since one of its features is to send instant messages through the internet... and I dont think I know that much about networks. So are there any good videos/articles you can suggest for networking? (bare in mind im a complete noob when it comes to networking, i have no idea what a server is, socket, HTTP etc).

Thirdly, what do these kind of statements mean:
Socket socket = new Socket("google.com", 80);
OutputStream out = socket.getOutputStream();

I understand the part where socket is an object of the Socket class but I dont really understand the second line where out = socket.getOutputStream();. Does this tell the computer to get the value of socket.getOutputStream and make that equal to the out object? And by doing that, is the object out a constant? E.g. has its value been finalized to socket.getOutputSteam?

Thanks for your help guys. Im new around here and hopefully I'll be around for more.

Answers to these questions will reveal themselves to you as you study Java or most any OOP language from the ground up. There are no shortcuts, and providing answers to the questions you have (like, an Object is an instance of a class) will not give you the understanding you need.

Start at the beginning and study. No, you're not ready to begin programming the Android app you've imagined.

then can you at least give me the answer to my third question??