Object-oriented programming has a few benefits over procedural programming, because it:
- allows you to create large, modular programs that can easily expand over time;
- hides the implementation from the end-user.
Consider Python packages like Scikit-learn, pandas, and NumPy. These are all Python packages built with object-oriented programming.
- class - a blueprint consisting of methods and attributes
- object - an instance of a class. It can help to think of objects as something in the real world like a yellow pencil, a small dog, a blue shirt, etc.
- attribute - a descriptor or characteristic. Examples would be color, length, size, etc. These attributes can take on specific values like blue, 3 inches, large, etc.
- method - an action that a class or object could take
- OOP - a commonly used abbreviation for object-oriented programming
- encapsulation - one of the fundamental ideas behind object-oriented programming is called encapsulation: you can combine functions and data all into a single entity. In object-oriented programming, this single entity is called a class. Encapsulation allows you to hide implementation details much like how the scikit-learn package hides the implementation of machine learning algorithms.
For a more detailed introduction follow this link.