I'm not good with the technical stuff, but NERD has a good intro on reptile genetics you should look into
http://www.newenglandreptile.com/genetics_intro.html I'll try to answer your questions anyway. Bear with me here~
Are you familiar with morphs? These are the genetic mutations that affect their appearances, causing all those fancy colors and patterns you see for sale. Example: I believe you said that you had two normal ball pythons. If you haven't already seen some of the morphs they come in, then here's a good list
http://www.worldofballpythons.com/morphs/
People pay more for these because they're less common than standard, wild-types and some combinations take generations of selective breeding to produce. Many are still relatively new and even more are still being created. Buy one and you can usually use those genes as a building block to make more complex ones. Plus a lot of people think they're pretty.
I think Albino/Amelanistic animals are the most common, you've probably seen one before. Since they lack melanin, the brown/black pigment, they only have the more colorful pigments left and are very brightly colored.
Hypo is the same idea, it's just short for
hypomelanistic or reduced melanin. They don't lack it completely, they just have less of it, resulting in an animal that's lighter than normal but still not as bright as an albino.
These are both simple
recessive traits in many species, meaning that both parents have to carry the gene for it to appear visually. Otherwise the offspring will have the gene, but it won't be expressed so they'll just look normal.
Het is short for
heterozygous which means the animal is a carrier for that gene.
So if I breed a normal animal to an albino animal, all the babies will look normal, but carry the hidden gene for albino in them. They'll be
het for albino or
albino hets and these are more valuable than normals because even though they may not look like anything special, I can still use them to produce more albinos by breeding them to another het or a visual albino. This is where those punnett squares come in handy for checking your odds!
BTW Gotta add - hypo is sometimes codominant in certain species meaning that it has "visual hets" and a "super" visual homozygous form. NERD's genetics intro site I linked has a page on it and they explain it better than I could.
I know it's confusing in the beginning, but after you start using the terms more and seeing them in action, it'll get a lot easier. Hope this helps!
