i originally bought it so i could understand a database script we were using a little better and i got hooked :)

Well, then the experience I and my client had with the book doesn't seem to be universally applicable.

However if I remember correctly the first scripts in the book reads from the commnand line (I don't have the book handy)? So if that's conceptually easy for you to grasp then that stumbling block is out of the way. My client choked right there,and was quite angry at me for recommending the book.

Maybe it still has to do with different backgrounds though. My first job as a professional programmer (after churning through assembly, pascal and cobol in school) was as a HyperCard programmer and that is probably what made the command line so alien to me. There is a command line in HyperCard but you only exececute HyperTalk from it, no custom input. Even today I'd rather write a perl/tk script than read from the command line :-)

/jeorgen