Drupal 7 much improves the classes added to the div surrounding form items (in Drupal 6 it was hard-coded to 'form-item'). The type of form element and the form element name are now added as form-item-type and form-item-name. You can see how Drupal does this (and see the theme function you would override to change this) at api.drupal.org/theme_form_element.
It's hard to convey just how important knowing how to make patches really is.
We can look at an issue queue and see all sorts of feature requests and bug reports. Some may have detailed suggestions of how to do a feature or even have code pasted into the comments that worked for one user. Some bug reports or follow-ups may have the problem identified down to the line of code.
But imagine that we made this module because we needed it, but we don't need the suggested feature or haven't run into the reported bug ourselves.
Microsoft has put a lot of resources into promoting Drupal
http://www.microsoft.com/web/drupal/
Cygwin gives us most of the UNIX-y goodness used in this book:
http://randyfay.com/node/70
