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Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Second Edition

You're reading from   Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Second Edition Building robust and maintainable software with object oriented design patterns in Python

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Product type Paperback
Published in Aug 2015
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781784398781
Length 460 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Dusty Phillips Dusty Phillips
Author Profile Icon Dusty Phillips
Dusty Phillips
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Table of Contents (15) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Object-oriented Design FREE CHAPTER 2. Objects in Python 3. When Objects Are Alike 4. Expecting the Unexpected 5. When to Use Object-oriented Programming 6. Python Data Structures 7. Python Object-oriented Shortcuts 8. Strings and Serialization 9. The Iterator Pattern 10. Python Design Patterns I 11. Python Design Patterns II 12. Testing Object-oriented Programs 13. Concurrency Index

Adding behavior to class data with properties


Throughout this book, we've been focusing on the separation of behavior and data. This is very important in object-oriented programming, but we're about to see that, in Python, the distinction can be uncannily blurry. Python is very good at blurring distinctions; it doesn't exactly help us to "think outside the box". Rather, it teaches us to stop thinking about the box.

Before we get into the details, let's discuss some bad object-oriented theory. Many object-oriented languages (Java is the most notorious) teach us to never access attributes directly. They insist that we write attribute access like this:

class Color:
    def __init__(self, rgb_value, name):
        self._rgb_value = rgb_value
        self._name = name

    def set_name(self, name):
        self._name = name
    
    def get_name(self):
        return self._name

The variables are prefixed with an underscore to suggest that they are private (other languages would actually force them...

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