Completing the Definition of the Class Coin

Often a good problem-solving strategy is to solve a somewhat simpler problem that we can enhance to solve the original problem. Recall that we defined the class Coin1 as a step towards the class Coin. The previous lesson shows the definition of this simpler class.

Revising the constructor

We decided in the previous lesson to have Coin1’s default constructor create a heads-up coin. Now let’s change that constructor so that new coins will be either heads or tails at random. To do that, we could have the constructor call the public method toss, but as we noted earlier in this chapter, calling a public method from within a constructor should be avoided for now. We can, however, define a private method getToss that does what toss did, and call it from both the constructor and toss, as follows: