The init method

The init method is a special method that gets invoked when an object is instantiated. Its full name is __init__ (two underscore characters, followed byinit, and then two more underscores). An init method for the Time class might look like:

def __init__(self,hour=0,minute=0,second=0):
        self.hour = hour
        self.minute = minute
        self.second = second

It is common for the parameters of __init__ to have the same names as the attributes. The parameters are optional, so if you call Time with no arguments, you get the default values. If you provide one argument, it overrides hour. If you provide two arguments, they override hour and minute. And if you provide three arguments, they override all three default values.

from Thinking in Python