Ask HN: what can I learn in a week that can greatly improve my work or life?

Regular expressions. If you want an in-depth book try Mastering Regular Expressions by Friedl. Or for a quick guide, http://regular-expressions.info along with http://rubular.com/

Regex will not only give you new skills for programming (no more splitting strings in weird ways and doing complex indexOf/substr operations), it will help you day-to-day in rummaging through file systems and your code.

And if you already know regex, then I'd recommend Map Reduce Streaming. The Streaming variety is all based on standard in/out and very straight forward. Amazaon Elastic Map-Reduce could be a nice way to test things.

Currently, I'm running a free summer camp online to help college students to learn the professional skills as a software engineer according to the industrial standard.

There are various options you can pick and choose to be hands-on. The "main dishes" is to help you run through a process from installation, configuration and deploy a real world web application with the full server stack.

Check it out if you have time. It is described in a Kickstarter project: "How to build a website like an engineer" http://kck.st/SY4CXv.

Without more info about what your work or life are about, it's hard to suggest something too specific. Since we're being generic, I'd say that it's hard to beat the value of learning how relational databases work. Focus on learning the basics of SELECT - that takes months but you can get the rudimentary parts down in a week. If you already know the basics, then look into index design. Why/when/how and all that.

Faster touch typing? If you're not already great at this you can improve productivity by improving your typing speed.

You can learn and practice on sites like http://ratatype.com/ and http://typeracer.com/

Personally I found Emacs greatly improved my productivity. First week was hell, but now I'm more productive than most people I know in my office.

You don't realize how much time you save by never having to life your hand from the keyboard.

Cooking.

Cooking.