Kshell is the same thing as using the command line in XWindows and your right, PERL is cryptic, but if your processing text centric data it is quite amazing.

PHP3 is a server side scripting language that is imbedded in the HTML like JavaScript but has excellent DB connectivity and has a syntax similar to C.
AND, is an open source language being developed like Linux or the GNU.

Check out www.php.net.