Why Do We Need Access Modifiers?

We need access modifiers to limit the modifications that code from outside the classes can make to the class’s methods and properties.

Once we define a property or method as private, only methods within the class are allowed to approach it. So, in order to interact with private methods and properties, we need to provide public methods. Inside these methods, we can put logic that can validate and restrict data that comes from outside the class.

Example: Validating checks using access modifiers

In our example, we can validate that only specific car models can make their way and be assigned to the $model property by defining the allowed alternatives for models in the setModel() method.