Object Oriented Programing is a design paradigm (approach) where data is assigned to a discrete object.

Overview

Each object has:

The state of an object are the values of its attributes

Classes vs Objects

A class is a definition of the structure of an object.
An object is an instance of a class.

Keywords: An object is said to be instantiated from a class.

Think of class inheritance…

An abstraction of a Dog and a Cat, would be for example, that they are both Animals.

Abstraction serves to generalise the properties and behaviour of objects - discarding the specific nuances of each object

Encapsulation refers to the private scope of an object’s attributes.

The attributes in an object ‘cannot’ be accessed by external entities.
Rather, the object must invoke one of its methods to retreive the attribute

#Aside (not in course)#

Ability for an object to act as a different data type depending on how it is used

Ability for a method to take in different parameters - but doesn’t occur in Python as it is a dynamically typed langauge