Reddit mentions of Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook

Sure thing! I really don't know a lot about shaders, or I kind of did understand them a bit in terms of "This is code to run on the gpu, it's a step in the rendering pipeline and it can run in a few different ways" but I bought the kindle edition of The Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook and it gets you started writing shaders right away pretty much as long as you can create shader files and materials in Unity and can use an image editting program like photoshop or gimp.

The weird part though is that the book seems a bit dated and they it has errors in it. If you look up the book's website the site has all the corrections which helps but between all that looking around you'll end up with some errors but the error messages were actually pretty friendly and helped me to learn. So it was a bumpy few hours but after that I can follow along in the book pretty easily and that shader is just a pieced together shader from the first chapter that I had to tweak a bit to get to work on a sprite renderer but I know I feel like if I can write a few basic shaders I can learn the rest and build them up. The book apparently goes up through post processing effects and some of the last chapters are things like creating a movie film effect.

If anyone has read and used the whole book please chime in! I'd say try out the free kindle sample and see if it's something that might be useful. But since it's dated I wouldn't recommend the physical version at $49 I'd definitely recommend the kindle for like $19.