I'm really making an effort to learn how to use Mental Rays shaders and utilities but I haven't found a single book that makes sense out of it. All of my books just tell you to plug this into that and type this and set this to that but none of them explain what any of this means. I've recently purchased a book called "Rendering with Mental Ray" (Mental Ray handbooks Volume 1, 3rd edition) by T. Driemeyer because it was expensive and updated to cover Mental Ray 3.4 but as big and detailed as the book is, it doesn't seem to really explain much. At least not in terms that make sense to me. I need a book that dumbs it down a bit.

Do any of you guys know of a good source of info that really explains how to use Mental Ray? There are all kinds of tutorials on using HDRI and Final Gather and the likes but nothing that covers how to use all of those Mental Ray nodes..

Thanks!