The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
The tooling nobody teaches and everybody is assumed to know: the shell, scripting, editors, version control internals, debugging and profiling. A dozen hours that pay back every week for the rest of your career.
Course
Other
MIT
About 12 hours
Beginner
Free
What it is
A free MIT course covering the practical tools of software work rather than the theory. The shell and shell scripting, command line utilities, vim, data wrangling, version control internals, debugging and profiling, metaprogramming and security basics.
Why it exists
Degree programmes teach algorithms and systems and quietly assume you will pick up the tooling somewhere. Most people never do properly, and spend years using a fraction of what their tools offer, doing by hand what a five line script would handle.
The lecture that pays for the course
Either the shell tooling lecture or the one on version control. Learning what Git is actually doing to a directed graph of commits, rather than memorising commands, converts Git from a source of anxiety into something you can reason about when it goes wrong.
Best for: students, self taught engineers, and anyone who has been using these tools for years without ever being taught them.
Ready to start?
Opens on MIT in a new tab.
Stuck on something specific?
Writing only gets you so far. If you want an answer to your situation rather than the general case, book a session and we will work through it together. Every session is free; a few slots open each week.
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