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[Dave Allured]

To Marco and all other beginners,

I do not think there is any reference book about Grads.

The primary reference is the Grads documentation website.  A lot of
effort was put into making it comprehensive.  There are three major
sections:  Users Guide, Tutorial, and Index.

   http://grads.iges.org/grads/gadoc/

If you have not yet discovered the Tutorial, I recommend studying that,
and trying some of the examples.  It takes a little while to do that,
but I think your understanding of Grads will be much better after you
have done this.

There is a fourth resource that everyone should use.  Before posting a
question to the mailing list, try searching the mailing list archives
for previous discussions on the same topic.  I think it's remarkable how
much good advice and detailed explanation has been written in these
archives:

   http://list.cineca.it/archives/gradsusr.html

There are some quirks to using Grads on Windows.  Much of this has been
discussed and is in the archives.  But sometimes you have to hunt for it.

There is one important concept for beginners that sometimes is not
clear.  The Grads command language and the Grads scripting language are
two different things with different syntaxes and name spaces.  The
command language is interactive only.  But the Grads scripting language
is used to pass Grads commands to the command interpreter as lines of
text.  In this way you can automate things and write sophisticated
scripts.  Think of the scripting language as a control layer riding on
top of the command language.

Learn first how to make a few simple plots with the interactive Grads
command language, before you move on to the scripting language.

I hope this is of some help.

--Dave A.
NOAA/ESRL/PSD
CIRES/CDC

Marco Filato wrote:
> Thanks for your answer and your help,
>
> But the problem is to get familiar with the windows command prompt.
> From the user guide there are a lot of steps that I have problem to
> understand.
> But I don't know any other book easier for Grads
> By
> Marco
>