The document discusses shaders in Unity and graphics programming. Shaders are programs that run on the graphics processing unit (GPU) and are used for tasks like vertex manipulation, lighting effects, shadows, textures and more. There are different types of shaders that run at various stages of the graphics pipeline, including vertex shaders and fragment shaders. Historically shaders were written in low-level code, but languages like Cg, HLSL and GLSL allow writing them in a style similar to C using features like loops, conditionals and functions. Unity supports several approaches to writing shaders including surface, vertex-fragment and fixed-function styles. The document provides examples of simple shader code and techniques for setting uniforms to pass