To describe a scene you will use a set of text consisting of statements with keywords and values, which must be written carefully! A comma or a bracket at the wrong place is likely to mess up the whole scene or make it not render able. The program is case-significant, which means that it considers capitals and small letters as different characters! Also, don't use specific national characters outside of comments or in file names!
The parser (= the part of the program, which translates the written statements into mathematical formulas) reads the text from top to bottom. Don't use abbreviations before you have declared them!
You may not divide keywords by spaces, but sometimes keyword must be separated by spaces from their according values! I.e. "scale2" is an error, but "scale 2" is ok! Multiple spaces and CR/LF between keywords are ignored. After the characters // you may write comments and remarks also using any specific national character sets, the rest of the line will be ignored. Longer comments spread over more then one line must use the sequences /* ("start of comment") and */ ("end of comment").

POV-Ray normally uses a so-called "left handed" coordinate system. The three dimensional coordinates for the directions x, y and z are defined relatively to each other as follows:

      x to the right positive following your thumb - horizontal
      y to    up    positive following your index finger - vertical
      z forward positive following your middle finger - away into of the depth of the space

Ordered groups of 3 or 4 floats (called "vectors") are written in brackets separated by commas: "< , , >" . For example, the point at x = 0.2, y = 3.35 and z = 1 is represented as <0.2,3.35,1>. The coordinates are noted in the alphabetic order according to the "left-hand-rule" <x,y,z> !
It is possible to describe values by arithmetic expressions, variables and formulas. If a vector is connected with an arithmetic expression like "*" then the operation is applied to every component of the vector: <0.5,1.0,3.5>*2 = < 0.5*2,1.0*2,3.5*2> = <1.0,2.0,7.0>. The basic arithmetic signs are: + , - , * , / and round brackets.
For the transformation of an angle A in degrees to its radiant value there exists the function radians(A). The functions sin(A) cos(A) tan(A) need the argument of the angle A in radiant value. With atan2(A,B) you can calculate the arctan of A/B, this gives the value of the angle in radians. Changing a radians value R to a degree value is possible by degrees(R). With this and a lot of many other float, vector and string functions, also very advanced users can be very satisfied!