Book Image

The Python Workshop - Second Edition

By : Corey Wade, Mario Corchero Jiménez, Andrew Bird, Dr. Lau Cher Han, Graham Lee
4.7 (3)
Book Image

The Python Workshop - Second Edition

4.7 (3)
By: Corey Wade, Mario Corchero Jiménez, Andrew Bird, Dr. Lau Cher Han, Graham Lee

Overview of this book

Python is among the most popular programming languages in the world. It’s ideal for beginners because it’s easy to read and write, and for developers, because it’s widely available with a strong support community, extensive documentation, and phenomenal libraries – both built-in and user-contributed. This project-based course has been designed by a team of expert authors to get you up and running with Python. You’ll work though engaging projects that’ll enable you to leverage your newfound Python skills efficiently in technical jobs, personal projects, and job interviews. The book will help you gain an edge in data science, web development, and software development, preparing you to tackle real-world challenges in Python and pursue advanced topics on your own. Throughout the chapters, each component has been explicitly designed to engage and stimulate different parts of the brain so that you can retain and apply what you learn in the practical context with maximum impact. By completing the course from start to finish, you’ll walk away feeling capable of tackling any real-world Python development problem.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
13
Chapter 13: The Evolution of Python – Discovering New Python Features

Classes and objects

Classes are fundamental to OOP languages such as Python. A class is simply a template for creating objects. Classes define an object’s various properties and specify the things you can do with that object. So far in this book, you have been relying on classes defined in the Python standard library or built into the Python programming language itself. For example, in Exercise 38 – finding the system date of Chapter 3, Executing Python – Programs, Algorithms, and Functions, you used the datetime class to retrieve the current date. You will start off by exploring some more of the classes you’ve already been using. This can be performed in a Python shell or Jupyter notebook.

Create a new integer object called x in a Python console:

>>> x = 10
>>> x
10

You can see the class that x was created from by calling the type function:

>>> type(x)
<class 'int'>

The integer class doesn’...