The chapters until this point covered an approach to programming that is often referred to as “structured programming” or “imperative programming,” wherein a program is considered a sequence of statements, decisions, and loops. You can solve any programming problem with a structured programming approach. However, in the last decades several other programming “paradigms” have been coined up, which help designing and implementing large-scale programs. One of the most successful paradigms is “object orientation,” and most modern programming languages support the object oriented paradigm. Python is, in fact, an object oriented language.

While object orientation tends to provide a natural way to look at problems and solutions, designing an object oriented program can be quite hard. The reason that it is hard, is that you have to really think about your approach to a problem in all of its aspects, before you start coding. For bigger problems, this can be daunting, especially when you lack experience with programming. However, for bigger problems you have to spend a lot of time designing your solution anyway, and an object oriented approach may be quite helpful in creating it. Moreover, you will find that most modules provide object oriented implementations, and that object orientation can be helpful for many smaller problems too.

Since object orientation is a broad topic, several chapters will be spent on it, of which this one is the first. It discusses the basics of object orientation, leaving the more specialized (and powereful!) aspects of object orientation for later chapters.