gee.. hold your horses will ya?
It's the first time in a looong time I take a few days off...
Now, for the scripting:
I did buy a book about MAXscripting, but found it very little help...so you can forget about that...
What I did back then is to start picking the scripts apart from others, looking how they did things, look through the demo scripts that come with MAX, etc...
I then started to change and adapt those scripts to my needs. Because I had zero knowledge of programming, it took me several weeks to get up to speed. But a very experienced programmer like Will Sutton (who made the first voxelizer) was able to pick it up in 3 days, on a joined programming project.
Biggest problem I had is to learn the vocabulary or building blocks of the scripting language.
In case you don't have it, here is the max3 demoscript for beginners:
Some more advanced function have been changed since then, but it should you give a good understanding to start with.
http://www.derelictstudios.net/users...Tools/DEMO.zip
THE best source for maxscripting is
http://www.scriptspot.com/
Most of the scripts are freeware, and a simple mail request to change or use parts of code is enough in most cases(in case you want to use bits&pieces...