What Is Object-Oriented Programming?

The term Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) may sound intimidating at first, but don’t worry. You don’t need to memorize anything yet—the goal is simply to understand the core idea.

Object-Oriented Programming is a programming paradigm, which means it is a particular way of organizing and designing software. It provides a structured approach for building applications by modeling real-world concepts as reusable objects.

What Is a Programming Paradigm?

Imagine someone tells you:

• If you want to read faster, learn speed-reading techniques.
• If you want to grow your money, invest it wisely.

In both cases, you’re following a specific approach to achieve a goal.

Programming works the same way. There are different approaches to designing software, and each approach is called a programming paradigm.

Object-Oriented Programming is one of the most widely used programming paradigms.

The Core Idea

Imagine you’re building a car.

Before manufacturing it, you first create a blueprint that describes its design, components, and behavior.

Once the blueprint is ready, you can manufacture one car—or thousands of cars—without redesigning everything from scratch.

Object-Oriented Programming follows the same principle.

You first create a Class, which acts as a blueprint, and then create Objects, which are real instances built from that blueprint.

Example

// Model
class Car {
  constructor() {
    console.log("This is car model");
  }
}

// Object
const car = new Car();

In this example:

• The class keyword defines a new blueprint.
• The blueprint is named Car. By convention, class names usually start with a capital letter (PascalCase).
• new Car() creates a new object from that blueprint.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand constructor or new yet—we’ll cover them in detail later. For now, focus only on the relationship between a Class and an Object.

Key Takeaways

• Object-Oriented Programming is a programming paradigm, not a programming language.
• A Class is a blueprint used to define objects.
• An Object is an instance created from a class.
• A single class can be used to create many different objects.