Object-oriented Programming, or OOP for short, is a programming paradigm that provides a means of structuring programs so that properties and behaviors are bundled into individual objects.

For instance, an object could represent a person with a name property, age, address, etc., with behaviors like walking, talking, breathing, and running. Or an email with properties like recipient list, subject, body, etc., and behaviors like adding attachments and sending.Put another way, object-oriented programming is an approach for modeling concrete, real-world things like cars as well as relations between things like companies and employees, students and teachers, etc. OOP models real-world entities as software objects, which have some data associated with them and can perform certain functions.

Object-oriented programming is based on the imperative programming paradigm, which uses statements to change a program’s state. It focuses on describing how a program should operate.