No idea about that package, but there is BioPython (http://biopython.org) so that's a possibility.
My usual advice for learning a language is to get the "plumbing" first. You don't even need to understand exactly what's happening at this stage, but learn to say parse command line arguments, read and write a disk file, connect to a database, open or listen on a socket, that sort of thing. You can just cut and paste code to do this at this stage. This gives you a framework for "doing stuff". Then it's just a matter of identifying a problem and gradually working your way towards a solution. E.g. if you wanted to read a file, do some computation, then store the result, you could concentrate on the interesting part. You'll learn how the plumbing actually works by osmosis as you go along.
If I could give some advice to my younger self, and he was programming in a vaccuum, I'd have said start with ML.