Book Image

The Python Apprentice

By : Robert Smallshire, Austin Bingham
Book Image

The Python Apprentice

By: Robert Smallshire, Austin Bingham

Overview of this book

Experienced programmers want to know how to enhance their craft and we want to help them start as apprentices with Python. We know that before mastering Python you need to learn the culture and the tools to become a productive member of any Python project. Our goal with this book is to give you a practical and thorough introduction to Python programming, providing you with the insight and technical craftsmanship you need to be a productive member of any Python project. Python is a big language, and it’s not our intention with this book to cover everything there is to know. We just want to make sure that you, as the developer, know the tools, basic idioms and of course the ins and outs of the language, the standard library and other modules to be able to jump into most projects.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
12
Afterword – Just the Beginning

Instance initializers


This class isn't very useful, because it can only represent one particular flight. We need to make the flight number configurable at the point a Flight is created. To do that we need to write an initializer method.

If provided, the initializer method is called as part of the process of creating a new object when we call the constructor. The initializer method must be called __init__() delimited by the double underscores used for Python runtime machinery. Like all other instance methods, the first argument to __init__() must be self.

In this case, we also pass a second formal argument to __init__() which is the flight number:

class Flight:

    def __init__(self, number):
        self._number = number

    def number(self):
        return self._number

The initializer should not return anything – it simply modifies the object referred to by self.

If you're coming from a Java, C#, or C++ background it's tempting to think of __init__() as being the constructor. This isn't quite...