Programming Machine Learning

Creating and Using Objects

Python is an object-oriented language. The code in this book, however, is targeted at programmers from all walks of life, including those who aren’t used to objects—so I avoided object-oriented programming in most of this book. There are only a few examples where I used object-oriented programming, because some library required it. This short section tells you everything you need to understand those examples.

You can see a Python object as a special kind of variable. Regular variables belong to the language’s built-in types, such as float or bool. By contrast, objects belong to types that are defined by yourself, or by a library. These higher-level types are called classes.

For example, Python has no built-in type ...