It's just buzzwords to get new people to sign up for and pay money for courses. If you know programming, cloud computing is nothing new. It's just a bunch of APIs, which you've used for decades. The difference is packaging and method of deployment (VM, automated, on-demand) and distributed architecture, which is nothing new and nothing you can't pick up reading a reference manual and spending a day messing around with things. Sure, there are some algorithms and tricks that work well in cloud, but again, pretty obvious stuff and not rocket science, like, hey, don't put your database on the other side of the planet.