3D Artist new to Shaders have general questions

Helloooooo!
My name is Nikos!
I'm 3D Artist mainly but i recently tried programming shaders and i found it quite fun and it comes also quite handy for my environment role as well!
So i have some questions :

a)Is Shader Programmer considered different than gameplay programmer?
Or those 2 are considered to fit in 1 job role?

b)Is there a good book which for beginners about programing shaders in Unity which explains step by step?
I find Untiy documents quite messed up and not as helpful as i expected them to be!

Thanks for answering my questions in advance!

 

I'd check out UnityCookie's shader tutorial. It will get you going... After three days on it I was able to write a texture atlas shader for terrain:

If you don't have a good grasp of vector mathematics, however, it might be pretty confusing...

 

Writing shader programs usually isn't so much related to gameplay.. I mean, can you `play` with the effect in the shader? The shader usually just draws stuff... and would need interaction from a script or something to turn it into gameplay, generally speaking.

I would say though that to write shaders you do need to be a programmer and therefore there's overlap with other programming roles.

 

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cg_Programming/Unity

 

I see your point!
So you are a programmer but a different role/aspect of programmer!

 

Is this source supposed to explain everything and teach a beginner?

 

I'm 3D Artist and i know some basics of programming so i think i will do fine,i guess at least

 

Shader Programming has more to do with 3D Mathematics than Programming.
If you are good with Vectors you are good to go.