A Data Scientist Should Know At Least This Much Python OOP

Just like a picture is worth a thousand words, a program is worth a hundred questions.

If one does a web search for OOP interview questions, the class design of a hotel’s reservation management system comes up often.

So here is my test: Design the classes for a small hotel’s reservation management system (RMS), where you utilize the concept of encapsulation, and at least once the concepts of inheritance, polymorphism, and object association.

The rest of this post depicts the solution of our little exercise.

SOLUTION: Design of the Reservation Management System for a Boutique Resort in Mykonos, Greece© 2mmedia/Adobe StockTo make this a fun learning experience, let us design the classes for the RMS of a boutique resort that rents villas in Mykonos, Greece.

The resort rents four standard villas and two VIP villas.

VIP villas are larger and come with a personal yacht.

All villas come with a personal assistant.

We will model the system with the following classes: villa, vipvilla, guest, reservation, resort.

Data EncapsulationClasses must protect the most critical asset, our data.

On the other hand, they must promote transparency and synergy by exposing certain data to the outside world using get/set access functions.

This OOP concept will permeate the design of all of the classes in our example, and each one of them will be designed such that it contains the data and only the data that is relevant to the class characteristics in the real world.

One of the least privileged class is villa, in the sense that it encapsulates the least data (the name of the villa and the name of the villa’s personal assistant).

It also offers informative functions about the hours that the personal assistant will be on call and the dates that the villa will be cleaned and keys will be changed.

Also, it has a function to print the label of the gift that is left in the room of each new guest:Class guest encapsulates the following attributes of a guest: first and last name, number of adults, and number of children in the room.

It offers an access function to the guest’s last name and a printing function for the guest object.

Inheritance and PolymorphismClass vipVilla offers examples of implementation of both class inheritance and polymorphism.

As we can see below, the class inherits from class villa and it redefines the base class method setPersonalAssistant().

Which method gets invoked, gets resolved by Python using method resolution order.

Object AssociationClass resort offers examples of this.

The methods setGuest() and setReservation() accept objects of type guest and reservation respectively.

In terms of encapsulation, class resort encapsulates the following attributes: a list with the names of the (standard) villas, a list with the names of the VIP villas, a guest list, a reservation list, and a reservation ID list.

Our final class is reservation, which encapsulates the following attributes of a reservation: the name of the reserved villa, check-in date, check-out date, reservation ID, a printing function for the reservation class.

The entire code along with a test module is on github: https://github.

com/theomitsa/python/blob/master/mykonos2.

ipynb.

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