Private, Public, Protected

Normally you don’t want to make instance variables public, and access them through methods. An exception to this rule would be when you want to make a constant variable. When you make an instance variable private you can only access it inside the class. This means if I make a child class I cannot use that private variable in that class. If for some reason you want a variable to be accessible in a child class and package, but nowhere else, you can make it protected. The last option is having no access modifier. This makes it so you can access that variable only in the same package.