OK, I'm a newb so I can ask dumb questions like this. Actually I hope I never get beyond the point of not feeling embarrassed to ask basic questions of this nature.

I've been reading over what I can find on the map files used in scanning, and honestly I feel like I'm the dumb kid on the block because I don't think I quite grasp what these are and what they do.

The "Scan Tool Getting Started" tutorial has a half page blurb about them, but doesn't really explain much about the utilitity of their usage. From what I THINK I can gather from this, a map file is a two dimensional grid displaying one value on the X-axis, and another value on the Y-axis. The data that is actually captured via scanning is plugged into the cell intersection of those two axis to show the values in relation to that grid. So if I wanted to scan for something like AFR, I would set up a map with RPM on one axis and perhaps intake manifold vacuum/pressure (for boost) and have the scanner plug the AFR data into the relevant cells in that display. Does that sound close to being right?

Granted, I'm still not finished reading the Scanning Tutorial, and maybe MAPs are explained fully there, but in case it is not, is there any other resource that would help me to better understand this concept? Oh, I did find some threads with links to external resources, but they were old threads with dead links, which is quite frustrating.

Thanks.