> At the other end you can have a great grasp of how to write clean, modular, well commented code and have no idea how you would start parsing a text file to extract all nouns or some other introductory undergraduate project for one of the infinitude of topics in CS.

How difficult is that to read up on? I do a lot more of the former than the latter as that is what real life jobs entail (actually most of them involve fixing other peoples shitty code).