Udacity Intro to Object Oriented Programming Review

Intro to Object Oriented Programming is a short overview of object oriented programming using the Python programming language. This is a beginner level course but it assumes you have a basic grasp of programming in python. It would be a good course to take after completing the first few weeks of an introductory python course like Udacity's CS 101, Rice's "An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python" on Coursera or MIT's "Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python" on EdX.

Intro to OOP provides a gentle introduction to using classes in python that starts by building up your confidence with creating programs with simple, yet interesting examples like drawing lines, sending text messages and filtering messages for profanity. The instructor uses built-in python class objects to introduce the concept of classes before having students create their own classes. In the final section, you'll use classes to make a basic movie website that plays trailers for your favorite movies. The course touches briefly on some advanced topics in object oriented programming like inheritance and method overriding.

The course is very well organized and the instructor explains OOP concepts in a way that makes them easy to understand. He also teaches students about the structure of python programs so that you gain an understanding of where functions and classes reside in python and its modules. The instructor frequently refers to the python docs, stackoverflow and Google to figure out how to do new things, which are good skills for new programmers to learn. Overall this is a great little course that could take anywhere from 5 to 15+ hours depending on your experience level and how much time you want to spend working on projects.

I give this course 5/5 stars: Excellent.