I see... weird quick gallup with googlefight says otherwise... whatever.
Anyway. you are in exceptional luck if you DO NOT KNOW much about programming in general as it makes things easier to work out in maya. Many a programmer will despair with maya. Why?
See in maya you rarely have direct access to things. But maya scripting engine works just like you the user would work. So maya scripting is about building node networks. (open up hypergraph graph the objects history and model a bit and you will get the idea in no time). For example:
a simple example which basically has the target of creating:
cube -> extrude -> extrude -> extrude -> extrude
for random end faces at each step. then animate each subsequent node on and off in a sequence. Looks like this:
proc string[] randomFaces(string $object){
print $object;
string $return[];
for ($item in ls -flatten ($object)
)
if (rand(0,6)>1)
$return[size($return)]=$item;
return $return;
}
{
$object=polyCube -w 1 -h 1 -d 1 -ch 1
;
for($i=0;$i<4;$i+=1){
$ext=polyExtrudeFacet -ch 1 -keepFacesTogether 0
-localTranslateZ 1
-ld 0 0 0
-offset (0.13) (randomFaces($object[0]+".f[0:6]") )
;
setKeyframe -v 1 -t ($i*2+2) -at nodeState $ext[0];
setKeyframe -v 0 -t ($i*2+3) -at nodeState $ext[0];
}
}
Fairly uninteresting but still.
Second thing is maya keeps telling you what the scripting components are all the time. If you do something maya makes script, so save out that something as a maya ascii and lo behold maya has made it into script. So now you have something to cut and paste.
Now hit f1 and read the manual