The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems
to machine learning, but there’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered,
and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with
their tools. We’ll teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful
text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!

Students spend hundreds of hours using these tools over the course of their
education (and thousands over their career), so it makes sense to make the
experience as fluid and frictionless as possible. Mastering these tools not
only enables you to spend less time on figuring out how to bend your tools to
your will, but it also lets you solve problems that would previously seem
impossibly complex.

Read about the motivation behind this class.

Video recordings of the lectures are available on
YouTube.

Staff: This class is co-taught by Anish, Jon, and Jose.
Questions: Email us at missing-semester@mit.edu.

We’ve also shared this class beyond MIT in the hopes that others may
benefit from these resources. You can find posts and discussion on

Note: these are external links to community translations. We have not vetted
them.

Have you created a translation of the course notes from this class? Submit a
pull request so
we can add it to the list!

Acknowledgements

We thank Elaine Mello, Jim Cain, and MIT Open
Learning for making it possible for us to
record lecture videos; Anthony Zolnik and MIT
AeroAstro for A/V equipment; and Brandi Adams and
MIT EECS for supporting this class.