What is a good curriculum to quickly improve in Chinese?

What are some good ways to improve programming skills for a mechanical engineer?

• I do know the basics of programming because I started coding at age 16(high school, thanks to CICSE's curriculum). Now nearly 4 years later, I think that my knowledge is quite insufficient. How can I improve and acquire some expert knowledge? (I've done some fiddling with MATLAB and Python)

• Answer:

  To start with, one needs to be able to convert the basic thought process into programming language. For this I suggest watching Gilbert Strang's Linear algebra videos[1]. You can implement all the course material in Python and develop a good command over both programming and linear algebra. The next step for me would be to learn and implement algorithms to solve common differential equations, like the heat equation, numerically using a programming language. http://lorenabarba.com/ has a nice set of video lectures [2] and accompanying IPython notebooks to help you [3]. Also, visualization of data is very important. Although anything from MATLAB to R does this, being pro open source, I prefer the Numpy and Scipy packages in Python. The book by Hans Peter Langtangen is also good if you want to use Python for computational science [4]. Personally, I would prefer learning a functional programming language too but that's a matter of choice really. I am learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(programming_language). Finally, if you want to delve into High performance computing, Parallel computing basics like http://www.open-mpi.org/ are important to learn too. These are from my experiences so far. I am still learning and probably will always be.  [1] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010/video-lectures/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL30F4C5ABCE62CB61 [3] https://bitbucket.org/cfdpython/cfd-python-class/overview [4] http://www.amazon.com/Python-Scripting-Computational-Science-Engineering/dp/3540739157