Java Object model- Equality testing

Some more excerpts from the same book(ObjectorientedDesignPatterns, by Cay Horstmann),
According to Horstmann, the perfect equals method is as below

pulic boolean equals(Object otherObject)
{

if(this==otherObject)
return true; //Many times equals is called on identical objects, then there is no reason

//to check for contents again
if(otherObject==null)//For any non null reference value x, x.equals(null) should return false
return false;

if(getClass()!=otherObject.getClass()//A different Class, obvious
return false;

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-//desired equality conditions to be checked follows...

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}