[VX ACE] PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE FOR SCRIPTS?

Ace uses Ruby as it's scripting language. You can find some decent lessons for it from beginner up at code academy (google it~). Also, make a new project and just mess around with numbers in the default scripts to get an idea of what they do. Thankfully there's some instruction with-in the scripts themselves as to what they effect, it's just learning how they affect things.

Also, I recommend grabbing a few scripts from the more prolific scripters around the community and checking out their notes. Some of them write some really neat instructions within their scripts that can help beginners start to understand how certain aspects affect things. Tsukihime, Fomar, modern_algebra, yanfly, TDS and jet are a few good people to check out.

It's a reasonably easy language to learn, from what I hear. I'm not exactly a scripter by any means but I've picked up enough just by reading and experimenting to know how to change a few things in scripts, so it's not too hard for a complete noob to pick up and play with.

As for what is and isn't allowed - claiming others' scripts as your own is a big no.
If you use someone's script in your project, credit them. If you're using one for a commercial project, check with the scripter to see whether that's allowed. Some don't mind, some do. It's best to check their usage policies.

For the most part they don't mind people using their scripts in their free-to-play games as long as they're properly credited.

When it comes to using scripts as building blocks, I'd recommend erring on the side of caution and either checking with the scripter or at least checking their script usage policies to see if there's anything against it. Always give credit, though.

Also, distributing scripts can be a big no - there's been a few cases where a script was taken from the scripters' own projects and distributed around. In the case when a scripter makes something for their own project or another persons' :just for them: it's considered very no to take it and use it. Stealing of any resource made for particular projects is considered very bad in most of the community (of at least this side of it. There are sites that will rip each others' pieces to shit just to get some pretty graphics or sounds. Assholes.)

That said, always credit, always check and don't steal from projects and you should be fine. ^.^

If you are familiar with programming in general, particularily Pascal language, you'll see Ruby as very easy language. It takes many clues from Pascal, like begin..end blocks, easy function definition, etc.

It's quite different from Pascal, yes, but for anyone with Pascal experience differences should be easy to pick up and in most cases they actually make sense such as ability to declare variables and constants mid-program (one of the only things about Pascal I don't like are var and const blocks - rest of syntax is actually good).

Anyway, VX Ace's help file provides reference of RGSS (which is very easy to understand and apply, contrary to many "documentation" of "libraries" I had "pleasure" to work with - such good documentation is a rare case in programming world, unfortunately).