Chapter Summary

This chapter covered the various techniques for managing access to attributes in Python, including the __getattr__ and __getattribute__ operator overloading methods, class properties, and attribute descriptors. Along the way, it compared and contrasted these tools and presented a handful of use cases to demonstrate their behavior.

Chapter 38 continues our tool-building survey with a look at decorators—code run automatically at function and class creation time, rather than on attribute access. Before we continue, though, let’s work through a set of questions to review what we’ve covered here.