Crash Course in to Python Programming
I had really been wanting to find a couple of hours to do a crash course on python and finally found an opportunity to do it last night.
Having been a programmer for a while, I’m finding many of the Python videos quite boring as they are for absolute beginners which has you plodding through the basics of programming which makes learning a new programming language painfully slow.
Luckily, I had found this great Python primer video by Derek Banas on YouTube.
I followed along and completed all the code in the video and had working examples of most of the important code snippets for much of how stuff gets done in Python. Success was not without some pain, see problems and resolutions below.
Video: Learn Python in One Video
I will save you some pain by telling you there is a very frustrating code issue at the end of this long video.
See code fix below.
When you are in the Dog class referencing the Animal super class from which it inherits the name, weight, height and sound, properties or values you have to use the setter and getter class methods instead of the object “self” reference like we could in the Animal object. Once you change that, the code works.
For the Dog class, the toString() method only worked for me the example below:
def toString(self):
return "{} is {} cm tall and {} kilograms, says {} and owner is {}".format(
self.get_name(),
self.get_height(),
self.get_weight(),
self.get_sound(),
self.__owner)
...instead of:
(this doesn't)
def toString(self):
return "{} is {} cm tall and {} kilograms, says {} and owner is {}".format(
self.__name,
self.__height,
self.__weight,
self.__sound,
self.__owner)As a bonus I would add watching this video to help solidify the idea of polymorphism if you’re having difficulty getting a grasp of it.
Hope this helps someone!
Video: What is Polymorphism?
