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IlyaShpitser comments on Low Hanging fruit for buying a better life - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm pretty skeptical of how much good a month of martial arts will do you once you're off the mat. Most of the value of martial arts is in conditioning (both physical and mental, e.g. making you more comfortable around people acting aggressively towards you), not technique, and a month of classes isn't nearly enough to build a strong foundation there. Even on the technique side, that much time will give you a few neat tricks but won't allow you to systematize them or to generalize them to unfamiliar situations.
On the other hand, a month is just about enough time to get you past the boring introductory lessons (how to stand, how to fall, how to throw a punch that doesn't completely suck) and into the meat of the art, so that kind of time might be a good sample if you're on the fence about a longer-term commitment.
Depends what you want out of it. If you want to fight effectively, efficient use of training time implies having a tight feedback loop to improve quickly, which means fighting a lot (for real). Fighting a lot is not a pleasant life.
You can get a lot of things out of martial arts training, but I don't think you can get many of them in a month. If you want to have a better chance in self-defense situations, you're not going to gain the skills or the habits you need for it until much later. If you want self-discipline et cetera, you're not going to get much of it from learning falls and a few basic escapes. If you want to get in shape, you'll barely have started. If you just want to have fun and feel badass... okay, it's plausible that you could do that in a month, but it's not going to last once you stop training.
I honestly feel that "learning to fight effectively" is kind of a red herring here. Martial arts does make you better at fighting -- but few people, martial artists or otherwise, are good at real, no-holds-barred fighting, because parts of that skillset are so dangerous that they basically can't be gained without being repeatedly injured or worse. But that goes for the bad guys, too. Self-defense largely isn't about beating your mugger or whatever in a serious fight; it's about deterrence, mainly through signaling comfort with conflict situations and by giving you the skills to deal with strongarm tactics short of serious fighting.
And I wouldn't recommend taking martial arts classes primarily for self-defense anyway, at least if you live in a Western country and not in the worst parts of a high-crime city.