[meadori]

I enjoyed this presentation by Allison Kaptur on how to understand CPython better:

http://pyvideo.org/video/3465/exploring-is-never-boring-unde...

While it is focused on CPython, most of the techniques are applicable elsewhere. It also mentions a great article by Peter Seibel (http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/) that discusses why we don't often read code in the same way we would literature.

Essentially, as the complexity of software has grown people have been forced to take a more experimental approach to understand software even though it was created by other people.