Any Materials Tutorials, or how to make a Marble Column?

Anyone have a link to any tuturials on how to design Materials (and shaders) to achieve a specific effect? I've looked over the docs, and have played around with Materials/Shaders, but so far, random experimentation isn't getting me where I'd like to go. :)

What I'm actually trying to make is a marble column. Looking at the Materials page, it looked like Glossy would be close - so naturally I can't find a Glossy Shader anywhere on the drop-down menu. :)

Glossy is the same thing as Specular.

might not be what your asking but this is what I would do------------------------

Use some type of seamless Procedural texture generator as the texture with a specular shader. and adjust adding more layers as needed

Maltus is right- the "best" way to do a realistic marble material is to write your own fragment shader implementation of a Perlin noise algorithm (google it), likely passing in some volumetric position data from the vertex shader. But that requires you to know some serious CS and be comfortable writing your own shaders.

A faster way would be to do a cylindrical unwrap of your column in Blender so you have a nice square to map a contiguous marble pattern to, then google for some tilable marble textures, or hack your own in an image editor and use a plain old specular pixel shader.

I made this Pillar in Blender would you like to do something like this?

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photo-pillar-image12864705

A good Procedural texture generator is MapZone, if I remember right there iss already a Marble Texture included.

http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/index.php?PAGE=HOME