I struggled to find advice on this anywhere, and as you can imagine, if you are looking for this, it's incredibly useful. I happened to stumble across this tutorial unintentionally after hours of unfruitful searching.
Rather than rehashing what is covered in this very well explained tutorial, I thought I'd just share it here.
Thanks a tonne ChunYou Sim for creating this excellent tutorial. It's a great starting place for Python in Houdini, and I was able to start using the information I learned in this video immediately.