"bash shell" reading in sections from a file - bash

Question

I'm new to bash scripting. Getting really hooked on text mate also. Anyways I have a txt file that contains something like as follows.....
Smith:David:111 Oak St.:Colorado Springs:CO:80901
Smith:Tina:111 Oak St.:Colorado Springs:CO:80901
Martin:Steve:2233 Cascade St.:Colorado Springs:CO:80907
I'm trying to create a program that will read it in and display in the following format.
Jane Doe
5245 Anystreet St.
Any City, State 22222
John Doe
2245 Anystreet St.
Any City, State 22222
I can't find beginner friendly documentation on what commands to use and how to use them. A few sights give great in depth documentation but it's hard to follow. I would like to implement the sort command and sort it by zipcode but I can't get a good example to follow. Can someone help me figure this out or help me get started?
----------------------------------------Further Questions "Updated"------------------------------
Thanks for the advice and it has helped out greatly. I wrote the program a few different ways however I have a few last questions on one example another student did. Don't quite understand everything in their code. I've put my questions as comments.

Answer 1

The task is trivial if you can use awk:
awk -F: '{print $2,$1 ORS $3 ORS $4", "$5,$6 ORS}' file
Test:
$ cat file
Smith:David:111 Oak St.:Colorado Springs:CO:80901
Smith:Tina:111 Oak St.:Colorado Springs:CO:80901
Martin:Steve:2233 Cascade St.:Colorado Springs:CO:80907
$ awk -F: '{print $2,$1 ORS $3 ORS $4", "$5,$6 ORS}' file
David Smith
111 Oak St.
Colorado Springs, CO 80901
Tina Smith
111 Oak St.
Colorado Springs, CO 80901
Steve Martin
2233 Cascade St.
Colorado Springs, CO 80907
You can use arrays in bash and do:
while IFS=: read -ra line; do
printf "%s %s\n%s\n%s, %s %s %s\n\n" "${line[1]}" "${line[0]}" "${line[2]}" "${line[3]}" "${line[4]}" "
${line[5]}";
done < file
Output
David Smith
111 Oak St.
Colorado Springs, CO 80901
Tina Smith
111 Oak St.
Colorado Springs, CO 80901
Steve Martin
2233 Cascade St.
Colorado Springs, CO 80907

Answer 2

You can set IFS to colon and then exploit that, carefully:
$ cat > xyz
Smith:David:111 Oak St.:Colorado Springs:CO:80901
Smith:Tina:111 Oak St.:Colorado Springs:CO:80901
Martin:Steve:2233 Cascade St.:Colorado Springs:CO:80907
$ while read line
> do (IFS=:
> set -- $line
> echo $2 $1
> echo $3
> echo $4, $5 $6
> echo
> )
> done < xyz
David Smith
111 Oak St.
Colorado Springs, CO 80901
Tina Smith
111 Oak St.
Colorado Springs, CO 80901
Steve Martin
2233 Cascade St.
Colorado Springs, CO 80907
$
The use of a sub-shell is optional, but means that IFS in the main shell is not changed — usually a good idea.

Answer 3

Thy this simple one:
cat file | sed -r 's/(.*):(.*):(.*):(.*):(.*):(.*)/\1 \2\n\3\n\4,\5 \6\n/'