The Quick Python Book, Third Edition

Chapter 15. Classes and object-oriented programming

This chapter covers

• Defining classes
• Using instance variables and @property
• Defining methods
• Defining class variables and methods
• Inheriting from other classes
• Making variables and methods private
• Inheriting from multiple classes

In this chapter, I discuss Python classes, which can be used to hold both data and code. Although most programmers are probably familiar with classes or objects in other languages, I make no particular assumptions about knowledge of a specific language or paradigm. In addition, this chapter is a description only of the constructs available in Python; it’s not an exposition on object-oriented programming (OOP) itself.

15.1. Defining classes

A class in Python is ...