First, you have POV-Ray up and running. You've tried one or two of the sample programs that come with the distribution set. Second, I will try to make this as platform generic as I can. Since I'm on an IBM Clone, I can't really try the source on any other computers, so don't kill me if I make a platform mistake. Before we start defining our first scene, it is important to understand what you have to tell POV-Ray about, to create any scene.
Any scene needs a minimum of three things.
One is a camera. Without a camera object, you can't see anything. Second is a light source. When we see, we don't really see the objects that we are looking at in the world, we are seeing the light being reflected off the objects. Third we need an object to look at.