Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps Transcripts
Chapter: App 7: Wizard Battle App
Lecture: Concept: Classes
0:01 Now that we've had a chance to work with classes in our wizard game,
0:03 let's take a moment and look at the most common features
0:06 that appear and are used with classes.
0:09 As you saw, we define all classes with the class keyword,
0:13 so here we are defining a creature class so we can say class creature,
0:18 and like all code suits or blocks in Python
0:21 we define the rest of the class by saying colon and then indenting four spaces,
0:26 everything that is indented, is part of the class,
0:29 so here you can see that we have two methods,
0:31 one method called walk is a standard instance method if you will,
0:36 and when you call it on an object
0:39 and instance of a creature you say creature.walk
0:41 and it takes whatever the name of that creature is and it says,
0:46 you know, let's say it's toad, so toad walks around.
0:48 See this yellow keyword self, this is a convention,
0:52 it could be called anything,
0:53 in other languages it's called this and like C# or C++
0:57 but here we are calling self and its pass to all instance methods
1:01 and that's how we access the field,
1:04 here we are saying self.name this is just a standard instance method,
1:08 the one above it is the initialzier, and you can tell
1:11 that is a magic method because it has double underscores on both sides,
1:15 so typically this is referred to as "dunder"
1:18 so here we would say __init__(),
1:20 and this is actually not often directly called
1:24 but it is actually part of the initialization creation process of the creature,
1:28 so when we create a new creature
1:30 we are going to actually pass this name and level
1:33 and then we somewhat dynamically create the fields
1:35 the name and the level on the self pointer.
1:39 Classes bundle together behavior and data,
1:42 here the data is the name and the level of the creature
1:44 and the behavior is its ability to walk around.
1:47 And these features of a class are the most common,
1:50 but in fact classes are very rich in Python as we'll see
1:53 you can have inheritance, you can have what are called properties,
1:57 you can have static methods, you can have class methods,
2:00 you can have static variables or fields on the class
2:04 so we are just using sort of the most common stuff here in our game,
2:08 but you can go really deep with classes and actually do a ton.