Learn Python by Building Data Science Applications

Inheritance

Another important property of the classes is their ability to inherit—some would say it is the most important feature of classes! What does inheritance mean? You can think of classes as Russian dolls—once you define one class, you can use it as a basis, wrapping another class around it. In this case, whenever there is a name collision, the new class will override the properties and methods but will keep all the other ones. This allows two main patterns of usage:

• First and foremost, we can define a base class (for example, Fish) describing some generic properties and logic that's relevant to the case. Once it is ready, we can start adding classes of specific fish—say, tuna, clownfish, and guppy —all inheriting from this base class, ...