With Drupal Panels, a site administrator can easily bring to life personal layouts for a multitude of uses.
If you ask the basic question: What is a Drupal Panel?, then a simple answer would be that it is a drag and drop component inside Drupal that will allow you to create custom layouts and also customize content inside them.
You can easily integrate Drupal Panels with other features of the core application to instantly create pages with very detailed permission levels.
There are numerous tricks that you may implement to get the most out of a panel and a page itself, but this usually means to write some PHP code to customize the appearence and behaviour of your page.
This following video is a basic introduction to Drupal panels, it’s a short, 5 minutes videos on the basics of panels.
Advanced Drupal Panels video
For a more indepth training on panels, please take a look at this video, 10 minutes lenght. Creating a Drupal page using panels is a breeze: