> Messing around with my terminal seems scary, am I likely to blow my computer up??
If you are not comfortable with the Terminal, give the miniAudicle a try
http://audicle.cs.princeton.edu/mini/mac/
I was just about to say the same; "the mini", as we affectionately call it makes sure you don't need the terminal and it already has a Virtual Machine and a simple editor build in so there is less need to figure out how the editing and the running of programs interact as a lot of that is already there for you. With friendly icons.
From there on I'd skim over the manual briefly, then run some of the examples that came with your download. Once you can run those you can try editing them and see how they change. If something is unclear I suggest looking that up in the manual, if you can't find it post here. That will get you a answer and will get us feedback on what issues the manual has. If the whole thing crashes that's not your fault; it shouldn't crash so report on any crashes you get to this list. Basically all of that is win/win for everyone.
Posting any especially fun bits of code is good too,
Oh, and you can't blow up your computer from the terminal, at least not casually. Anything that might blow will need your "root password". You can, of course, erase whole directory structures from the terminal, but you won't do that by accident. in case of doubt there are many good web pages that summarise the most important features of the "bash" shell (which is what your terminal is).
Happy ChucKing, and remember that if you can't find the answer yourself with a bit of looking it's clearly not a dumb question.
Yours,
Kas.