Object Oriented Pirates programming adventure in Python

This course teaches you how to take a single script and use OOP techniques to refactor it into modules in a playful way. You learn Inheritance, Composition and Polymorphism and use UML to design and communicate the system. The customer keeps requesting new features that forces you to think about the right tool in the right place. Will OOP allow you to refactor the code each time without risk of breaking things? Prepare for a big exercise in organizing code!

Target audience

Developers who especially benefit from this course, are:

• beginner programmers who want to practice OOP basics

• developers who want to learn how to turn small scripts into logical code modules

• developers who want to learn how to refactor code with minimal change and risk

  
  

Challenges

Students that are interested in this course often know basic Python features but are not yet aware of the role of OOP in structuring your code. Perhaps they have seen classes, objects, inheritance and polymorphism but they don’t know where and when to apply these techniques. This can lead to the wrong technique in the wrong place, which makes OOP useless and inefficient. Because this course focuses on changing code, you learn WHEN, WHAT and more important, WHY you can apply a certain OOP technique and perhaps even more interesting, when a certain technique is NOT appropriate anymore and needs to be replaced with another one.

What can you do after this course?

• improve existing and future code by effectively refactoring code into small modules

• decouple your modules by using dependency injection

• make modules into plugins by using Polymorphism

• solve open-closed principle violations by using composition

• communicate your designs with UML class diagrams

  
  

Topics

• Classes and Objects: Class instantiation, self, data attributes, UML, methods

• Inheritance: When to use and not use Inheritance

• UML: Use UML class diagrams to design and communicate your system

• Polymorphism: Open-closed principle, prevent switches (if/else)

• Composition: Replace inheritance with composition

• Refactoring: Split up scripts and make a system modular to achieve single responsibility

• JSON: Load data from a JSON file

• Generator expressions and List comprehensions: Convert JSON data to object efficiently

  
  

Duration

1,5 hours video time, 3 hours including practicing exercises.

The teacher

This course is taught by Loek van den Ouweland, a senior software engineer with 25 years of professional experience. Loek is the creator of Wunderlist for windows, Microsoft To-do and Mahjong for Windows and loves to teach software engineering.