Ah I see! Yeah sorry for the basic info then I was a bit confused by your question. I’ll take a look though my initial thought is that all data between nodes in Cycles is most likely an array of floats. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the nodes are basically wrappers around GLSL shader scripts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL_Shading_Language) which typically operate on floats within the C-like scrips.
So while I don’t know for certain, having not yet looked at the source, I would guess that an understanding of GLSL will translate pretty easily to understanding of cycles.
Not sure if that helps though, I’ll probably be looking at the source to Blender in the near future myself (though not as much in shaders, more on geometry)
