Adding custom attributes in Python - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Adding Custom Attributes to a Python Object

📖 Scenario: You are creating a simple program to store information about a book. You want to add extra details to the book object by adding custom attributes.

🎯 Goal: Build a Python program that creates a book object, adds a custom attribute to it, and then prints that attribute.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a class called Book with a title attribute

Create an instance of Book called my_book with the title 'Python Basics'

Add a custom attribute called author to my_book with the value 'Alice'

Print the value of the author attribute from my_book

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Adding custom attributes to objects is useful when you want to store extra information that was not planned when the class was first created.

💼 Career

Understanding how to add and use custom attributes helps in flexible software design and is common in many programming jobs involving object-oriented programming.

1

Create the Book class and an instance

Create a class called Book with an __init__ method that takes title as a parameter and sets it as an attribute. Then create an instance called my_book with the title 'Python Basics'.

Python

# Create the Book class and an instance called my_book
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use class Book: to start the class. Inside, define def __init__(self, title): and set self.title = title. Then create my_book = Book('Python Basics').

2

Add a custom attribute to the book instance

Add a custom attribute called author to the my_book object and set its value to 'Alice'.

Python

class Book:
    def __init__(self, title):
        self.title = title

my_book = Book('Python Basics')
# Add the author attribute to my_book
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use dot notation to add the attribute: my_book.author = 'Alice'.

3

Access the custom attribute

Write a line of code that accesses the author attribute from my_book and stores it in a variable called book_author.

Python

class Book:
    def __init__(self, title):
        self.title = title

my_book = Book('Python Basics')
my_book.author = 'Alice'
# Store the author attribute in book_author
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use book_author = my_book.author to get the author attribute.

4

Print the custom attribute

Print the value of the variable book_author.

Python

class Book:
    def __init__(self, title):
        self.title = title

my_book = Book('Python Basics')
my_book.author = 'Alice'
book_author = my_book.author
# Print book_author
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(book_author) to show the author.