Shader School

I'd like to start playing with creating font shaders.

Problem is, I have no shader or cg experience at all.

To get me started (and maybe some other interested folks), would one of the shader gods who read the posts in this forum please write up a GUIText material shader that does some simple realtime imaging to a gui font?

Say, a shader that puts a stroke border around the GUIText.

Or even better, a shader that does an inner/outter glow or even a gradient on the GUIText.

TIA!