You don't mention whether you can run the code, whether it works as intended and your experience level vs. the authors'. I've never seen any formal resources a

You don't mention whether you can run the code, whether it works as intended and your experience level vs. the authors'. I've never seen any formal resources and progress will be really slow at first but will accelerate as you keep chipping away at it. I've found that commenting sections with explanations and questions helps. Sometimes I rename variables with names that make more sense to me. If the code is very idiomatic it helps to understand why things are done a certain way. I look at a lot of vendor libraries that are poorly written and sometimes it easy to assume that because it comes from someone else it's written in a smarter way, when the opposite is true. I work mostly in statically typed languages that allow creating call trees - not sure if that's workable for Python or not - but there may be tools more advanced than simple grep.