hey sorry for the delayed response!! my very first intro to shaders was a computer graphics course i took in college - unfortunately everything went pretty much over my head. it wasn't until around a year later when i was like "i want to make cool sparkly rocks" that i started to teach myself and really started to understand what was going on. there were definitely some connections made when i started to teach myself back to the graphics course i took, but it was in no way a requirement for learning them, more of a like, "oh! i understand that now!" which seems to be a pretty common pattern for me when learning new shader techniques. i would attempt things a lot and run into a wall, then move onto something else, and then maybe a year or so later i would come back to the stuff i didn't understand and ended up getting it. turns out doing things improves your knowledge and understanding of them!!

this list is suuper outdated but i have a list of people who make some great tutorials <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/shader-resources-25306738">here</a>. as for advice, mostly just to keep at it! like i said i ran into a ton of roadblocks while learning, but after taking some time to try out other things, i'd manage to learn the things giving me trouble in the end. also don't be afraid to google literally everything, or experiment between programming shaders / node based solutions. i mostly write them, but there's a tonn of great node-based shader options and resources out there that are probably a lot more user-friendly. once you have a general idea of how shaders work, it gets a bit easier to jump between programs and languages. and if you have any other questions i'm more than happy to answer!!