December 2011
Beginner
508 pages
13h 42m
English
Content preview from Introduction to Computing Using Python: An Application Development FocusBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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CHAPTER 8
Object-Oriented Programming
8.1 Defining a New Python Class
8.2 Examples of User-Defined Classes
8.3 Designing New Container Classes
8.7 Case Study: Indexing and Iterators
Solutions to Practice Problems
THIS CHAPTER DESCRIBES how to implement new Python classes and introduces object-oriented programming (OOP).
There are several reasons why programming languages such as Python enable developers to define new classes. Classes that are custom-built for a particular application will make the application program more intuitive and easier to develop, debug, read, and maintain.
The ability to create new classes also enables a new approach to structuring application programs. A function exposes to the user its behavior but encapsulates (i.e., hides) its implementation. Similarly, a class exposes to the user the methods that can be applied to objects of the class (i.e., class instances) but encapsulates how the data contained in the objects is stored and how the class methods are implemented. This property of classes is achieved thanks to fine-grained, customized namespaces that are associated with every class and object. OOP is a software development paradigm that achieves modularity and code portability by organizing application programs around components that are classes and objects.
8.1 Defining a New Python Class
We now explain how to define a new class in Python. The first ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.