Looking at Shader

Shaders are your colors, texture and what will the camera pickup during render, they will decide how shiny( that's specular to you technical fella), reflectivity,  translucency ( aka opacity ) and what color ( also known as diffuse.

and not be confuse between texture artist and shader artist, in a more technical term and requirements THEY ARE NOT THE SAME, I'll be elaborating this more as i write down more stuff. a general idea is that:

-Texture painters are the ones doing the painting in Photoshop and Mari, using photos and brushes to create / manipulate how a CG thing will look

-Shader artist how ever will be the one grabbing the texture images from the Texture painters and give them the CG properties like specularity, reflectivity and etc in which will react accordingly to the light source . they will also be writing codes and command using programming language like mel script for maya user

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/14360-shader-writing-and-why-is-so-important/

so below are the default shaders that is available as of maya 2010 they are from left : Hair Tube shader, Ocean shader, Anisotropic, Blinn, Lambert, Phong, Phong E, Ramp and the
bottom : Shading Map, Shading Surface

 Shaders with a singular light source

Shaders with multiple light source for this case 3 point lights