Hands-On Software Engineering with Python

Structure and standards for classes

Class definitions, whether for concrete/instantiable classes or any of the ABC variants, have a similar structure defined, and will be arranged in sorted groups as follows:

• Class attributes and constants
• Property getter methods
• Property setter methods
• Property deleter methods
• Instance property definitions
• Object initialization (__init__)
• Object deletion (__del__)
• Instance methods (concrete or abstract)
• Overrides of standard built-in methods (__str__)
• Class methods
• Static methods

The property getter, setter, and deleter methods approach was selected, rather than using method decoration, in order to make it easier to keep property documentation in a single location in the class definition. The use of properties ...