Python 3 Object Oriented Programming

Composition and inheritance

So far, we've learned to design systems as a group of interacting objects, where each interaction is viewing the objects involved at an appropriate level of abstraction. But we don't know yet how to create those levels of abstraction. There are a variety of ways to do this; we'll discuss some advanced design patterns in Chapter 8 and Chapter 9. But even most design patterns rely on two basic principles known as composition and inheritance.

Composition is the act of collecting together several objects to compose a new one. Composition is usually a good choice when one object is part of another object. We've already seen a first hint of composition in the mechanic example. A car is composed of an engine, transmission, ...