##Single Table Inheritance
A.K.A. "The One Table to Rule them All" A.K.A. STI
Single table inheritance comes from trying to figure out a way to convert the magic inheritance from object oriented programming into the relational database system.
So to understand it you need to understand the basics of inheritance in object oriented programming.
You have a class that can have some attributes. In Ruby you would initialize the class. And and give it some basic attributes and maybe some class methods.