Linear regression and linear algebra

OK, OK, I shouldn't be so excited about this, but my machine learning class hasn't even started and I'm already grooving on the preparation parts. Including linear regression and linear algebra.

• Linear regression in financial analysis [investopedia] - this is magic to a lot of people.
• Linear algebra is nearly universally based on BLAS: the Fortran-written Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms.
• Here's a textbook on elementary linear algebra.
• ATLAS is a library for linear algebra built on top of BLAS.
• And in general this all leads into numerical linear algebra.

So, yeah, that's all a valuable domain. I could particularly see a code generator writing literate programs to solve linear algebra problems, then running them in a separate process. This is the kind of thing I want to get into.