Book Image

Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Third Edition

By : Dusty Phillips
Book Image

Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Third Edition

By: Dusty Phillips

Overview of this book

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a popular design paradigm in which data and behaviors are encapsulated in such a way that they can be manipulated together. This third edition of Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming fully explains classes, data encapsulation, and exceptions with an emphasis on when you can use each principle to develop well-designed software. Starting with a detailed analysis of object-oriented programming, you will use the Python programming language to clearly grasp key concepts from the object-oriented paradigm. You will learn how to create maintainable applications by studying higher level design patterns. The book will show you the complexities of string and file manipulation, and how Python distinguishes between binary and textual data. Not one, but two very powerful automated testing systems, unittest and pytest, will be introduced in this book. You'll get a comprehensive introduction to Python's concurrent programming ecosystem. By the end of the book, you will have thoroughly learned object-oriented principles using Python syntax and be able to create robust and reliable programs confidently.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

An alternative to method overloading

One prominent feature of many object-oriented programming languages is a tool called method overloading. Method overloading simply refers to having multiple methods with the same name that accept different sets of arguments. In statically typed languages, this is useful if we want to have a method that accepts either an integer or a string, for example. In non-object-oriented languages, we might need two functions, called add_s and add_i, to accommodate such situations. In statically typed object-oriented languages, we'd need two methods, both called add, one that accepts strings, and one that accepts integers.

In Python, we've already seen that we only need one method, which accepts any type of object. It may have to do some testing on the object type (for example, if it is a string, convert it to an integer), but only one method...