Inheritance Case Study

This case study brings together everything covered in this module - classes, constructors, inheritance, method overriding, and getters/setters - into a single, realistic example: modeling employees at a company.

The Scenario

A company wants to model two types of employees: a general Employee and a more specific Manager, who is also an employee but has an additional responsibility - managing a team - and a different way of calculating their bonus.

class Employee:
    def __init__(self, name, salary):
        self.name = name
        self.__salary = salary   # private attribute

    @property
    def salary(self):
        return self.__salary

    @salary.setter
    def salary(self, amount):
        if amount < 0:
            print("Salary cannot be negative")
        else:
            self.__salary = amount

    def calculate_bonus(self):
        return self.__salary * 0.05

    def details(self):
        print(f"{self.name} earns a bonus of {self.calculate_bonus()}")


class Manager(Employee):
    def __init__(self, name, salary, team_size):
        super().__init__(name, salary)
        self.team_size = team_size

    def calculate_bonus(self):   # overriding
        base_bonus = super().calculate_bonus()
        return base_bonus + (self.team_size * 500)

    def details(self):   # overriding
        super().details()
        print(f"{self.name} manages a team of {self.team_size}")

Putting It All Together

emp = Employee("Rohit", 50000)
mgr = Manager("Priya", 80000, 6)

emp.details()
# Rohit earns a bonus of 2500.0

mgr.details()
# Priya earns a bonus of 43000.0
# Priya manages a team of 6

Notice how Manager reuses Employee's constructor and salary logic through super(), but overrides calculate_bonus() and details() to add its own specific behavior - a clean, realistic demonstration of inheritance, overriding, and encapsulation working together.

Coming Up Next

Next, the course moves into Python's module system, starting with the Standard Library - the vast collection of built-in modules that ship with Python.