usefulness of this construct in section finalthis is method that cannot be overridden by subclass staticthis is method that is associated with the class itselfand not with particular instance of the class static methods can also be used to change the state of static variables associated with class (provided these variables are not declared to be finalreturn types method definition must specify the type of value the method will return if the method does not return valuethen the keyword void must be used if the return type is voidthe method is called procedureotherwiseit is called function to return value in javaa method must use the return keyword (and the type returned must match the return type of the methodhere is an example of method (from inside the gnome classthat is functionpublic booleanismagical (returnmagicalas soon as return is performed in java functionthe method ends java functions can return only one value to return multiple values in javawe should instead combine all the values we wish to return in compound objectwhose instance variables include all the values we want to returnand then return reference to that compound object in additionwe can change the internal state of an object that is passed to method as another way of "returningmultiple results parameters method' parameters are defined in comma-separated list enclosed in parentheses after the name of the method parameter consists of two partsthe parameter type and the parameter name if method has no parametersthen only an empty pair of parentheses is used all parameters in java are passed by valuethat isany time we pass parameter to methoda copy of that parameter is made for use within the method body so if we pass an int variable to methodthen that variable' integer value is copied the method can change the copy but not the original if we pass an object reference as parameter to methodthen the reference is copied as well remember that we can have many different variables that all refer to the same object changing the