I've been taking electronic music classes at school and I was doing a
Google search on the different instruments. The monome popped up on a
few websites, and I looked at some of the youtube vids. I
was surprisingly intrigued by how all this worked. I'm thinking about
getting one, but I'm a complete novice. I was just wondering how a
monome worked exactly with laymen's terms. Thanks for the time and
advice.

it's 64 buttons and 64 LEDs that are completely independent of each 
other, they just happen to be aligned on top of each other.

on the computer run a program called monomeserial that reads and writes 
bytes from the USB driver to the monome device.  monomeserial also reads 
and writes OSC (google it, it's like an updated midi standard) or MIDI 
into your computer that other apps use to talk with.  download 
monomeserial you'll see a box for "prefix" that's the tag that other 
apps look for, typically this is set to "/box"

I believe at a low level the software just issues commands like /box/1 1 
1 to turn on the LED at 1,1 and /box 1 1 0 to turn it off, I haven't 
delved into making stuff yet.  there are also other helper apps to talk 
to the 40h, like _40h_midi which is a midi interface helper app, just 
set it to a midi channel in/out port and write to it, the 40h buttons 
are all on midi notes.

it's all open source, users have written apps in max/msp, reaktor, chuck 
and Pd, all of which you can use and tweak for your own purposes. 
everything you need to get into the details is known and published and 
it's not complicated.  (though the stuff users have made is pretty 
stunning, like mlr and flip)


I'm out of school but am learning max/msp.  the 40h has been a GREAT way 
to get button presses into max and play with outputting data to the 40h, 
the two go great together.

hth.