Self meaning

When you pass "self" into a method, essentially what you're doing is passing the instance of that object into the method so that you can call the object and get it's attributes.

Look at it this way, say we have a Class, we'll call it "OurClass"

import random

class OurClass:
    name = random.choice(["Bill", "Kary", "Not Bill", "Fred"])

    def get_name(self):
        return "HI! My name is {}".format(self.name)

As we can see, in our new class we have a name variable that holds a string. Everytime we create a OurClass object it picks a random name from our list of names. Lucky for us we made a method called "get_name" so we can figure out, in a nice way, what our new objects name is!

Let's say we do this like so (we're in a python console now):

>>> import OurClass
>>> new_object = OurClass()
>>> new_object.get_name()
HI! My name is Bill

So, what happened here? Well when we created the object it picked one of the names we provided in the list, this time it was "Bill". We then called the method "get_name" to see what our new object was called.

So, what is "self". Self is basically "new_object" in this instance. Self essentially passes "new_object" back into the method "get_name" automatically so that way we can get it's attributes and special information. In this case, it's got a randomized name.

If we just tried this:

def get_name():
   return "HI! My name is {}".format(name)

We get an error! Why? It's because "name" refers to nothing. "self.name" on the other hand calls the passed in objects name attribute. Since it was set randomly to "Bill" it returns the string "Bill" to the .format method.

"Self" is just a placeholder that says "this is a reference to it*self*". So we can use it's attributes without knowing exactly what they are (in case they are random or have been changed by another program)

Hope that helps!