Well British Universities charge £1000 per year in Tuition fees (going up) for an electronic degree....
walters, it has already been said phase-shift is only relevant between waveforms of the same freq.
Take a simple sinusoidal waveform
Sin(wt)
That has a freq of w
Now lets take a waveform
Sin(wt + a)
THIS waveform now has a phaseshift of "a" radians w.r.t. Sin(wt).
So say you have two waveforms of the same freq and you measure the time difference between them (say looking for the zero-crossings). you NEED to know the freq.
Say you have a phase shift of 50us (measured from the scope) and the freq is 1kHz.
The period for 1kHz is 1mS. 50uS is 5% of the total time period, so the phase shift in degree's is 5% of 360deg = 18deg
THIS is true for any repeating waveform: Triangle, squarewave, complex
AS LONG AS THE FREQ ARE EQUAL