curious16

This may well be entirely anecdotal because I don't think there is any official data to this somewhat ambiguous question.

But based on your experience, if you have worked with quite a few number of programmers and engineers from a few schools, which school tends to produce the most well rounded programmers/engineers (as much as a school can train someone out of the box)?

Many universities have there undergrad curriculum available online along with their course materials (slides, videos, assignments, etc). Some are locked down and little searching reveals sources. E.g.: Berkeley, MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc.

My question is has anyone here on HN did something like picking one school's curriculum and studying its entire undergrad core sequence or something similar to go from knowing nothing about the subject (or trivial something) to becoming well versed to find a job or do something else.

Since CS and Math are the most accessible subjects, I mentioned majorly those two. Any other subjects are also welcome.

How long did it take you? Which courses were the highlights?

As a programmer I feel I am quite deficient in mathematics. I have some reminiscent knowledge of calculus and matrix algebra from college. But I don't know how to read or write correct proofs.

I don't have access to any teacher so books and online courses will be my best bet. Can you throw some suggestions at me?

Let me be clear upfront about what I mean by working with data. Generally working with data means that you have some form of data and you do some kind of analysis on it. Now once I have very clean structured data already available data analysis becomes easy.

But what if I have data that is not clean in form of files or databases? Then I have to read the files, clean it up and structure it in data structures according to my need (is THIS called parsing?). I am talking about this preprocessing part.

What CS or programming subjects should I study to become somewhat of an expert in data cleaning, preprocessing and structuring large amounts of files in batches?

I am also interested in the second part of the pipeline where I analyse the data and produce output both in terms of good visualisations and output data to be stored in files.

Any books/courses or any other types of resource pointers will be appreciated.

P.S.: Files can be anything. They are just streams of bytes. Images, audio, video, text, csv.

Maybe it is a life hack, a new topic, a new recipe, etc. Whatever YOU think is exciting to you.

Your life is yours. There are many sectors to it. So you decide what meaningful actually means and which sector it belongs to.

Some students/researchers who like to learn mainly from books have a few favourites that they attribute to their acquired knowledge/skillset.

Do you have any such "best" book in your research career till now?