Unfortunate newbie questions!

[Chris Lasher]

I would have to say that never having done any OO programming before in
my life, I found _Learning_Python_ by Lutz & Ascher had a great couple
of chapters on it. The diagrams about inheritance and subclassing
really helped a lot and they describe the purpose of using OOP quite
well. I see you already have that book, so perhaps you are not far
enough into it yet to hit those chapters. I think they did a great job
getting me off to a good start.

For a follow-up book, I second the recommendation of Mark Hammond's
_Dive_Into_Python_, which is mentioned above. It's a wonderful way to
learn by example. I absolutely ate up the chapters about Unit Testing.