Re: Great for this Engineer
'very little actual core information' ?????
What course did you do? "Avoidance of Computer Engineering"?
Basic CS courses have plenty of lambda calculus (aka denotational semantics) - and that's a SOLID body of theory - not just "descriptions of programming languages"
Databases, Information Retrieval, Non linear optimization, Operations Research, Graphics (2D & 3D), not to mention Digital Signal Processing ...
And don't even get me started on compilers and processors ...