Mixing and matching these things to get that thing

So I need the right shader for this thing, and a wild guess of mine has it that outright asking people to make shaders for me is terribly bad form. I don’t contest that, thus I’m looking at doing it myself. What I’m trying to get at is a sort of universal toonish shader that would support outlines, specular highlights (also toonish), transparency and double-sided polys. Maybe also one without that last one.

The catch is that I’m a complete idiot. I know next to nothing – scratch that, absolutely nothing of the ins and outs of rendering a polygon, I wouldn’t know where to start if it kicked me in the arse and I wouldn’t want to stuff myself full of technical knowledge only to drop it all after one shader. All I’ve figured out on me own so far is mixing and matching passes out of different shaders, but that lent me little to nothing in practice.

So I guess me question is, have we got something I won’t feel too guilty shamelessly cribbing off of?

Are you aware of the wiki?
To better understand how shaders work, I recommend the Nvidia Cg tutorial.