Foundational Python for Data Science

14

Object-Oriented Programming

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

Martin Fowler

In This Chapter

• Linking state and function

• Classes and objects

• Special functions

• Class inheritance

The object-oriented approach to programming is one of the most popular approaches. It is an approach that tries to model objects and their relationships by combining functionality and data. If you think of modeling a car in code, the object-oriented approach is to have both methods that take actions such as accelerating or breaking as well as data such as the amount of fuel in the gas tank attached to the same object. Other approaches would keep the data (the gas level, in this case) separate ...