This class is going to cover the basics of OOP

4 Pillars:

• Abstraction
• Inheritance
• Polymorphism
• Encapsulation

Other learning outcomes:

• Git + GitHub
• Documentation with Markdown
• Best practices and organisation

Class

• Is a blueprint of an object
• It wraps methods and attributes

Methods

• Like functions, they can take in arguments and run a block of code. However, they can only be used by an instance of its' class.

Instance / object

• It is an occurrence of an object

Attributes

• Holds information about specific object.
• They are set in the def__init__() method with arguments like any other function.

def__init__()

• Also known as constructor or initializer
• This method runs every time an object is created. So when you do:

animal = Animal('Fred', 10, 2)

self

• refers to the object / instance

inheritance

• Ability of classes to inherit characteristics (parameters) and behaviours (methods) from parent class.

Polymorphism

• Poly: many
• morph : forms
• Polymorphism : 'Many forms'
• Polymorphism in OOP is the ability to change methods and characteristics of instances of child classes.
  • Method polymorphism (At method level)

Abstraction

• Hiding complexity from the user
• For example: If you want to turn on the TV, you just press the on button on the remote but detail of how it actually works is hidden
• Specific to us, we will:
  • Write nice documentation for how to import and use our code
  • Use inheritance and importing to hide the code
  • Ultimately we can package it into a module that could be imported with PIP

Encapsulation

• Restricting access and making methods or attributes private
• In python things are by default public, to make it private you use double underscore __#
• When a method or an attribute is private, it can only be accessed by it's own internal (in the class) methods. It cannot be called from the run file.