They have some good tutorials on their site for both programmers and non-programmers; I haven’t tried the non-programmer version, but the programmer version was very easy to follow. I’d highly recommend checking out the tutorials and playing with it; it’s well worth knowing and I’m sure there will be a lot of instances where it would be useful.

BeanShell is a cool thing I found a little while back; it’s a scripting environment for java.  At first I didn’t see the point, but when you bring up the BeanShell Desktop that’s included in the download, it gives you a console where you can test out java stuff.  It even lets you use Swing, or any other java library I suppose.  I use it mostly for testing out regular expressions, or for doing quick sanity checks to make sure my code is going to do what I expect it to do.  Check it out; I’m sure you can find something to use it for.