I'm glad to see Dan doing such a project, because i know it will be aproached from the 'creative' viewpoint on each of his above topics.

scripting, programming, shaders shouldn't even be a part of this work. They are manuals/books in of themselves and as Dan is the ideal person to explain creativity and working with the tools, subjects like programming scripts and shaders should be covered by people that are well versed in those topics.

I just hope Dan covers modeling with as much emphisis in using MED from start to finish vs using a 3rd party application ( i.e. modeling a humanoid , skinning and aniamting it all with MED)

a decient section on how to do importing/exporting from other tools would be good too