Welcome to Python! One way to get you up to speed fast (and fun) is take some java app you've written and implement it in Jython. After you've done that, and gotten over the pleasant surprise of how short and clean your code has become, go over the source again and see where you can replace calls to java libs with calls to Python libs. E.g. for xml & xpath use ElementTree instead of JDom, for timing use Python's timeit module, etcetera. Although I've been using Python for a while now I've done the same thing recently and was surprised by how clearly that exercise showed Python's strengths.
Just go ahead and start programming is the best way to learn about the philosophies behind a language. 2B -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list