Model Builder
From Wildsong
ArcGIS 9.x has a new thing called "Model Builder" that lets you build scripts in the form of flow charts and then execute them.
The idea is to make programming more accessible for non-programmers.
The flow chart "language" is extremely limited as a programming medium, but it has one big advantage for learning to program in the ESRI domain. Once you have a "model" built and working, you can generate the equivalent Python code. (Model->Export->To Script->Python). This gives you a starting point for writing your own Python Geoprocessing scripts for use as components in Model Builder, or as standalone tools.
There used to be a joke in programming school back in the olden days that went like this: All flow charts can be simplified to this:
