1e. Class methods and members

Question 1

What are class methods and properties?

Answer 1

They are methods and properties that are shared across all instances of a class.

Question 2

What convention is used for naming class attributes?

Answer 2

SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE

Question 3

How do you define a class method?

Answer 3

By using the @classmethod decorator. The rest is identical to how you define an instance method.

eg.
@classmethod
def do_something(cls):
    pass

Question 4

What’s the first parameter that a class method takes?

Answer 4

The class itself. Like self for instance methods, we don’t need to pass this parameter in manually.

Question 5

What are static methods?

Answer 5

They are methods that don’t modify the state of either the class or specific objects.

Question 6

How do you define a static method?

Answer 6

By using the @staticmethod decorator. The rest is identical to how you define an instance method.

eg.
@staticmethod
def do_something():
    pass

Question 7

What scenario is a static method most useful for?

Answer 7

They are useful when a method doesn’t need to access any properties of an object or a class but still makes sense for it to be a part of a class. In other words, namespacing.

Question 8

How do you define a class attribute?

Answer 8

By defining an attribute outside the \_\_init\_\_ function without using self.