I understand that most graphics resources out there focus on real-time 3D rendering for games or writing raytracers, which I agree are currently industry specific topics. Your average developer isn't going to write a vector graphics library as part of their day job, but the browser abstracts computer graphics in the same way it abstracts networking or compilers, so if the goal is to understand the underlying principles of software platforms you'll be working on every day I think computer graphics is a strange, biased, omission.