What is Object Oriented Programming (OOP) in Python?

Key Takeaways

hi I'm Austin so palea with real Python comm and I welcome you to our series on object-oriented programming in Python 3 this is one of the biggest and most important subjects in all of programming and as you can see we have a lot to cover this series will provide you with a basic conceptual understanding of object-oriented programming so that you can take your Python programming skills to the next level to fully appreciate the subject we have to first understand why we need it programs are very complex things and there's a hundred different ways that you could define what a program is formally but basically all programs are a set of instructions for manipulating data in some meaningful way when I teach Python to kids I always have them write a program that calculates how many days old they are and that's a great example of a program that follows these three steps first the program has to ask the user for their birth date that's the data it's going to accept and then it manipulates the data by subtracting the current date from the user's birth date finally the program displays the result of this calculation on the screen that's a great starter program but it's pretty trivial how do we manage large programs with lots of data to keep track of like a video game as you might have guessed that's where oriented programming comes in object-oriented programming or oo P for short is a very common programming paradigm informally this means that it's a specific way of designing programs like a style that's widely used in software projects not every program should be written with oo P but many are and lots of languages support it a lot of the Python code you interact with on a daily basis will be written using oo P understanding this is a fundamental part of becoming a great Python programmer it opens the door to creating really cool software at the heart of oh oh P is the idea that a program is composed of lots of individual objects you can think of these objects as entities or things in your program oftentimes they are nouns in your project such as a person a house an email or any other entity like that these objects are like little bundles of data that are passed around throughout the life of your program for example a person might have properties like name age and home address this is the individual data that the object stores throughout its life in the program when we create this person object we'll make sure to give it a name and age and an address objects also have behaviors these are the actions that the object can take our person should be able to walk talk and breathe for example oftentimes these behaviors will need to reference the properties of the object for example if we make our talk behavior print the name and the age of the person then our person object would need to know what its name and ages those properties we gave it earlier before if this all seems a little bit confusing right now don't worry when I started programming this was the first real hurdle I ran into and it just took some dedication and practice till I finally understood it will make heavy use of objects throughout the rest of the series and you'll love the feeling you get when it just clicks for you in the next video we'll learn how to define our own objects using Python classes I'll see you there