I'm interested in learning about Shaders: What are they, when/for what would I use them, and how to use them. (Specifically I'm interested in Water and Bloom effects, but I know close to 0 about Shaders, so I need a general introduction).
I saw a lot of books that are a couple of years old, so I don't know if they still apply. I'm targeting XNA 4.0 at the moment (which I believe means HLSL Shaders for Shader Model 4.0), but anything that generally targets DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4 is helpful I guess.
Answer
These are all still relevant (and free online). CG tutorial (cg is virtually identical to hlsl) would probably be a good starting point.
The GPU Gems books are sorta like recipe books for random effects, they assume you know what you're doing, but they're great resources once you're more comfortable with things.
EDIT: and yeah, just about any tutorials/books you can find on shaders will still be relevant, a shader written for Shader Model 1 will run with Shader Model 4, and in a lot of cases you'll want to target lower shader models, since many effects don't need the extra stuff offered by the newer models (you can make nice water and bloom effects with SM2.0, and then if dx9 is an option you can target lower end hardware).
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