I wouldnt say you'd be totally helpless if you know enough c-script to make an object rotate, but youd have a hard time trying to figure out whats going on in the shader world.

Before you even get into shaders I think you may have to understand about the rendering pipeline, because as I have experienced, the shaders are so beautiful that they are so hard to understand. Im sure there are alot of free tutorials online, and some good books if youre willing to pay.

Try this wiki link, it may give you SOME type of grounding as to what the hell is going on with shaders:

http://www.shaderx.com/direct3d.net/tutorials/shader/shader1.html