Jason, be very careful about putting much weight on comments from programmers. When you get a bunch of guys (mostly guys) with the same skill together in one place, they'll tend to start spouting machoisms to show off. Programmers will say things like, "You don't really understand X until you can do <something I just learned to do>" or "You're not a REAL programmer until you <abandon some modern convenience in favor of the programming equivalent of stone knives>" or whatever.

Ignore it. Programming is like any other skill, where mastering the fundamentals is the heart of it. There are a LOT of basic concepts---basic and composite data types and data structures, the difference between a thing and some kind of pointer to a thing, ways of repeating operations (looping or recursion), breaking big problems into small ones and building back up to the big, being aware of causes, symptoms, and cures for common errors (off-by-one bug, overflowing an int, testing floating point nums with equals, etc.)

What matters most is training these basic ideas into reflexes and learning to easily match combinations of these basics to most problems you encounter.

Learn the basics, then tackle lots of fairly simple, common programming tasks (google for sites that offer lots of programming exercises) until those basics become part of you. You should also work on "fun" projects of your own at the same time so it won't get boring. Forget the arcane and obscure features and techniques for a while. They won't make you a great programmer; mastery of the fundamentals will.

Meta classes are pretty interesting creatures and they allow you to generate custom classes at runtime which can be quite useful. I didn't mean that you'd get to them in 30 days but if you really like Python and eventually come around to developing fairly complex applications - you might need them.

Django's ORM is a pretty good example of some great meta classery. The stack overflow question posted earlier is a good resource that you should bookmark so that you can look at it when you actually come across some meta classes.

Can't tell if he was serious or not, but metaclasses have no place in a 30 day quest to learn Python.

Anyone want to explain meta classes for me? Without knowing anything from the start, I would think that they are some subset of classes, maybe they inherit from some built-in classes in Python? I'm somewhat familiar with what classes are - a defined object that has certain characteristics that describe it and store information about it, as well as methods that can be used on that object. I always think of a rocketship class that might have a size, color, velocity, health, fuel, etc. and then have methods like accelerate, decelerate, rotate, shoot, etc. How do meta classes differ?