I reccommend ksh over bash. That's all I use these days. It was sh done right, although it does have a bit of history to it for compatibility.

To use associative arrays in ksh:

  typeset -A table
  column="name"
  table[$column]="value"
  echo ${table[$column]}

ksh is much more decent than bash, although I reccommend using in an emacs M-x shell buffer for better command line editing.

Edit: forgot to dereference column when setting value in table.