RobertMcCarthy, in addition to what Chirone said, it would help to know what renderer you're using. Maya Softwere renderer or Mental Ray? Also you can mislead someone when you refer to blinn as being a texture, fractal and checker are textures, blinn, lambert, and mia_material_x are shaders.

And as far as tutorials getting into lighting and rendering, its necessary because for performance's sake default settings are low (and non-existent environments like Chirone said) this needs to be changed or some material configurations will not look anything like they're supposed to.