This online book named The Book of Shaders by Patricio Gonzalez Vivo and Jen Lowe is a good start to learn and test shaders.
The authors tell us:
Getting started
What is a fragment shader?
In the previous chapter we described shaders as the equivalent of the Gutenberg press for graphics. Why? And more importantly: what's a shader?
If you already have experience making drawings with computers, you know that in that process you draw a circle, then a rectangle, a line, some triangles until you compose the image you want. That process is very similar to writing a letter or a book by hand - it is a set of instructions that do one task after another.
Shaders are also a set of instructions, but the instructions are executed all at once for every single pixel on the screen. That means the code you write has to behave differently depending on the position of the pixel on the screen. Like a type press, your program will work as a function that receives a position and returns a color, and when it's compiled it will run extraordinarily fast.
Why are shaders fast?
To answer this, I present the wonders of parallel processing.
Imagine the CPU of your computer as a big industrial pipe, and every task as something that passes through it - like a factory line. Some tasks are bigger than others, which means they require more time and energy to deal with. We say they require more processing power. Because of the architecture of computers the jobs are forced to run in a series; each job has to be finished one at a time. Modern computers usually have groups of four processors that work like these pipes, completing tasks one after another to keeping things running smoothly. Each pipe is also known as a thread.
Video games and other graphic applications require a lot more processing power than other programs. Because of their graphic content they have to do huge numbers of pixel-by-pixel operations. Every single pixel on the screen needs to be computed, and in 3D games geometries and perspectives need to be calculated as well.
You can test online the shader editor on this webpage.
