Book Image

Python 3 Object Oriented Programming

By : Dusty Phillips
Book Image

Python 3 Object Oriented Programming

By: Dusty Phillips

Overview of this book

Object Oriented Programming is a very important aspect of modern programming languages. The basic principles of Object Oriented Programming are relatively easy to learn. Putting them together into working designs can be challenging.This book makes programming more of a pleasure than a chore using powerful Python 3 object-oriented features of Python 3. It clearly demonstrates the core OOP principles and how to correctly implement OOP in Python. Object Oriented Programming ranks high in importance among the many models Python supports. Yet, many programmers never bother learning the powerful features that make this language object oriented.The book teaches when and how OOP should be correctly applied. It emphasizes not only the simple syntax of OOP in Python, but also how to combine these objects into well-designed software.This book will introduce you to the terminology of the object-oriented paradigm, focusing on object-oriented design with step-by-step examples. It will take you from simple inheritance, one of the most useful tools in the object-oriented programmer's toolbox, all the way through to cooperative inheritance, one of the most complicated. You will be able to raise, handle, define, and manipulate exceptions.You will be able to integrate the object-oriented and the not-so-object-oriented aspects of Python. You will also be able to create maintainable applications by studying higher level design patterns. You'll learn 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 will be introduced to you. You'll understand the joy of unit testing and just how easy they are to create. You'll even study higher level libraries such as database connectors and GUI toolkits and how they apply object-oriented principles.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Python 3 Object Oriented Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Unit testing


Let's start our exploration with Python's built-in test library. This library provides a common interface for unit tests. Unit tests are a special kind of automated test that focuses on testing the least amount of code possible in any one test. Each test tests a single unit of the total amount of available code.

The Python library for this is called, unsurprisingly: unittest. It provides several tools for creating and running unit tests, the most important being the TestCase class. This class provides a set of methods that allow us to compare values, set up tests, and clean up after running them.

When we want to write a set of unit tests for a specific task, we create a subclass of TestCase, and write methods that accept no arguments to do the actual testing. These methods must all start with the string test. If this convention is followed, they'll automatically be run as part of the test process. Normally, the tests set some values on an object and then run a method, and use...