Regarding your question in the Simple Questions thread...
'ASM' refers to 'assembly'. 'Assembly' is a complex means of hacking, kind of like scripting, but considerably harder. It involves editing the code of the game (I believe). You can use ASM to implement tile animations (and much much more), though I don't know the first thing about it.
XSE... Though I am a beginner scripter myself, I use 'diegoisawesome's XSE scripting tutorial', and things are going fine for me. Look for it in the Tutorials section, it should be on the first or second page. For combining aspects of scripts (as you said, having a message, then giving an item in the same script), I'm pretty sure you just layer the commands, like this:
...
...
msgbox @person MSG_NORMAL
giveitem [item ID]
release
end
I'm almost positive that's how it's done. Another good way to learn about scripting with XSE is to decompile scripts in the official games (just double click them in Advance Map with XSE set as the scripter, and click the decompile button at the top).
Hope this helps you out. I'm no expert on
either scripting or ASM, but that's what I know, it's a place to start, anyway.