quartz composer definition

Hey guys, so i've been working on quartz for a few months now and i've referred to you guys a few times. Honestly i have to say that i'm extermely enjoying myself. But unfortunetly i still feel lost in the fog. This is totally new to me, i've never done any kind of programming weather visual or text based. I went to school for photoshop, after effects, some 3D modeling and things of that nature. I do digital signage and my boss wants quartz to be the future for our digital signage network. So he throws me under the bus and tells me to learn it. Now i'm the only one working on quartz (i'm on a 9-man team) with very little help from a company called Helius.

So my question's are what exactly is quartz (what kind of programming is it), what prior experience should i have that might make things easier, smoother workflow. Are there any kind of quartz composer books or programming books that are similar to quartz. I've found some books about the developers tool kit or on the whole Xcode suite. Which is awesome but i'm not using all that for work and mentally i feel not ready for that amount of insane brainy work yet. I'm still trying to wrap my head around quartz. Are there any classes, workshops, seminars or anything that goes over quartz. Finally, would it be useful to know/learn other languages such as Cocoa, Ruby, Python.

I'm checking the wiki page now on it and wouldn't mind other peoples real world expierence. Thanks guys for all your help. I'll def be active on this forum since this now seems to be my job now lol.