To help you understand objects and their contents, let’s begin with a simple analogy. Suppose you want to drive a car and make it go faster by pressing its accelerator pedal. What must happen before you can do this? Well, before you can drive a car, someone has to design it. A car typically begins as engineering drawings, similar to the blueprints that describe the design of a house. These drawings include the design for an accelerator pedal. The pedal hides from the driver the complex mechanisms that make the car go faster, just as the brake pedal “hides” the mechanisms that slow the car, and the steering wheel “hides” the mechanisms that turn the car. This enables people with little or no knowledge of how engines, braking and steering mechanisms work to drive a car easily.

Just as you cannot cook meals in the blueprint of a kitchen, you cannot drive a car’s engineering drawings. Before you can drive a car, it must be built from the engineering drawings that describe it. A completed car has an actual accelerator pedal to make it go faster, but even that’s not enough—the car won’t accelerate on its own (hopefully!), so the driver must press the pedal to accelerate the car.

Let’s use our car example to introduce some key object-oriented programming concepts. Performing a task in a program requires a method. The method houses the program statements that perform its tasks. The method hides these statements from its user, just as the accelerator pedal of a car hides from the driver the mechanisms of making the car go faster. In Python, a program unit called a class houses the set of methods that perform the class’s tasks. For example, a class that represents a bank account might contain one method to deposit money to an account, another to withdraw money from an account and a third to inquire what the account’s balance is. A class is similar in concept to a car’s engineering drawings, which house the design of an accelerator pedal, steering wheel, and so on.

Just as someone has to build a car from its engineering drawings before you can drive a car, you must build an object of a class before a program can perform the tasks that the class’s methods define. The process of doing this is called instantiation. An object is then referred to as an instance of its class.

Just as a car’s engineering drawings can be reused many times to build many cars, you can reuse a class many times to build many objects. Reuse of existing classes when building new classes and programs saves time and effort. Reuse also helps you build more reliable and effective systems because existing classes and components often have undergone extensive testing, debugging (that is, finding and removing errors) and performance tuning. Just as the notion of interchangeable parts was crucial to the Industrial Revolution, reusable classes are crucial to the software revolution that has been spurred by object technology.

In Python, you’ll typically use a building-block approach to create your programs. To avoid reinventing the wheel, you’ll use existing high-quality pieces wherever possible. This software reuse is a key benefit of object-oriented programming.

When you drive a car, pressing its gas pedal sends a message to the car to perform a task—that is, to go faster. Similarly, you send messages to an object. Each message is implemented as a method call that tells a method of the object to perform its task. For example, a program might call a bank-account object’s deposit method to increase the account’s balance.

A car, besides having capabilities to accomplish tasks, also has attributes, such as its color, its number of doors, the amount of gas in its tank, its current speed and its record of total miles driven (i.e., its odometer reading). Like its capabilities, the car’s attributes are represented as part of its design in its engineering diagrams (which, for example, include an odometer and a fuel gauge). As you drive an actual car, these attributes are carried along with the car. Every car maintains its own attributes. For example, each car knows how much gas is in its own gas tank, but not how much is in the tanks of other cars.

An object, similarly, has attributes that it carries along as it’s used in a program. These attributes are specified as part of the object’s class. For example, a bank-account object has a balance attribute that represents the amount of money in the account. Each bank-account object knows the balance in the account it represents, but not the balances of the other accounts in the bank. Attributes are specified by the class’s instance variables. A class’s (and its object’s) attributes and methods are intimately related, so classes wrap together their attributes and methods.

A new class of objects can be created conveniently by inheritance—the new class (called the subclass) starts with the characteristics of an existing class (called the superclass), possibly customizing them and adding unique characteristics of its own. In our car analogy, an object of class “convertible” certainly is an object of the more general class “automobile,” but more specifically, the roof can be raised or lowered.

Soon you’ll be writing programs in Python. How will you create the code (i.e., the program instructions) for your programs? Perhaps, like many programmers, you’ll simply turn on your computer and start typing. This approach may work for small programs (like the ones we present in the early chapters of the book), but what if you were asked to create a software system to control thousands of automated teller machines for a major bank? Or suppose you were asked to work on a team of 1,000 software developers building the next generation of the U.S. air traffic control system? For projects so large and complex, you should not simply sit down and start writing programs.

To create the best solutions, you should follow a detailed analysis process for determining your project’s requirements (i.e., defining what the system is supposed to do), then develop a design that satisfies them (i.e., specifying how the system should do it). Ideally, you’d go through this process and carefully review the design (and have your design reviewed by other software professionals) before writing any code. If this process involves analyzing and designing your system from an object-oriented point of view, it’s called an object-oriented analysis-and-design (OOAD) process. Languages like Python are object-oriented. Programming in such a language, called object-oriented programming (OOP), allows you to implement an object-oriented design as a working system.