How to access shapefile attributes?

[Jeff Portwine]

I'm just learning how to use mapscript for displaying my maps, and I am
trying to figure out how you would access the attribute data in your
shapefiles?    I have a layer of roads, and I'm using the Tiger data which
has fields for street names, address ranges, and zipcodes.    Eventually
what I'd like to do is to be able to read a list of addresses and place a
marker on the map at each of those addresses.

I'm not exactly sure how to do that even when I learn how to access the
data.... there was some code posted to this list sometime back for getting
the coordinates of a street address and I could possibly use that, but it
requires a specific set of fields to be present in the shape file and I'd
have to do some manipulation of the fields I actually have to use that code
and that might be just as tricky as writing the code myself :)

Thanks for any pointers,

Jeff