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Exercising Your New Knowledge

Ian Currie

Python Basics: Object-Oriented Programming
Ian Currie 01:46

Course Slides (.pdf) Sample Code (.zip) Ask a Question

00:00 As with most things, but especially with classes, you need to exercise your new knowledge to make it stick and to include it—to be able to include it—as part of your tool kit when you go forward.

00:12 Do exercises, write small scripts that make use of classes, and notice whenever you’re using classes as well. The Python standard library relies heavily on object-oriented programming.

00:24 So here are some exercises for you to try. Modify the Doggo class to include another attribute—.coat_color, for example—and add that to the .__init__() constructor.

00:36 Maybe also add that to the .__str__() function.

00:40 Create a new class, a Car class, with a few instances that would be appropriate for cars. Add a .mileage attribute to the Car class, and then add a .drive() instance method to the class, which will add a number of miles to the mileage. So if you instantiate a car—I don’t know, a Ford—and then you say ford.drive(), and you pass in, say, 10 to that method, if you look at the ford.mileage, you’ll see that 10 has been added to the mileage, which might have started out at 0, or maybe the starting mileage is something that you can pass in to the constructor.

01:17 Already here you can see that you can really get creative with classes, and that’s the best thing to do to really get a grip on it. So good luck, and definitely do these exercises.

01:28 It’s one thing just to look through and say, yep, I understand that. Yep, I understand that. Yep, I understand that. But when you actually come to a blank script and have to actually write this stuff and get it working, that’s when you realize, oh, I didn’t understand that part. So definitely give that a shot.

CB on Oct. 31, 2023

An example solution would be really useful here!

Bartosz Zaczyński RP Team on Nov. 2, 2023

@CB Agreed! Please find an entire collection of exercises accompanying this video course, along with their solutions and detailed discussions, in a separate course: Python Basics Exercises: Object-Oriented Programming. If you have specific questions, then don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments or hop on the Real Python Slack.

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