Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all, I used array a lot in C,VB,C# and java but now i am very new to shell programming,so i need a start of array in shell programming. All i want to do is read a string and put it into a character type array. For reading the string,i did this:

$ read a

now i want to put the content of a into a character type array..........how to do this?

please help me

thank you

Read about shell arrays - bash - here:
Arrays