Summary

One of the most important programming concepts in modern computer science is object-oriented programming. We learned in this chapter how to define objects as instances of classes, which we provide with methods and attributes. The first parameter of methods, usually denoted by self, plays an important and special role. You saw methods that can be used to define basic operations such as + and * for your own classes.

While in other programming languages attributes and methods can be protected against unintended use, Python allows a technique to hide attributes and access these hidden attributes through special getter and setter methods. To this end, you met an important function, property.