I guess you are using the ‘old’ water material here. It still works well for doing flat/still surface of water like a pond or a lake but there’s much better since NME.
Some people already created a base you could use, and fairly easily twist and tweak to your liking. You don’t need knowledge on how to write shaders but you need to understand a bit (quite a bit) about meshes, materials and nodes. Though thanks to the node material editor, you can safely just try your luck and experience, starting by changing values, importing new textures, create new or remove nodes. There’s also plenty of videos and examples available from the doc and this forum post.
I would start by checking out the ocean material demo and the new water map that just came in lately (courtesy of @Lun). If you want to create shores, this version shader has already this part so I would probably start from there.
Else, I can easily imagine a water material shader created from this all-new GLSL shader editor from @andyray. The hybrid editor requires a bit of knowledge on how to write shaders but is very intuitive and has a lot to offer (although in beta).
Well, I hope you find these answers useful and do not hesitate to come back here to share your findings and the result with us. We are always in need of new ways and new design for this sort of thing.
Meanwhile, have a great day 