Fluid splatters and also sand dust

I'm hoping there's good CG courses for learning how to manipulate fluids in simple ways, like having a custom starting container and a custom target surface, or, making the fluid flow along a curve too. 

Similarly, I'm also hoping there's a particle systems demo showing how to create sand in the shape of something else, like where you render particles in a sphere and then drop it on a surface so it spreads out in a certain way.

I tried the default CORE physics, but it was sort of awkward in the way it taught, I just wasn't really seeing that it would teach me the fundamentals of fluid and particle physics so that I'd understand how to do these things myself from the ground up, so I'm unsure where else to turn.