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The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

Note: this site is under construction for the 2020 offering of this IAP class.

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.

Registration

Sign up for the IAP 2020 class here.

Schedule

The class will run in the afternoons, Monday through Thursday, from 1/13 to 1/30. Lectures will be 50 minutes long. We will also have office hours after every class.

We're in the process of reserving a classroom, so the location and exact time will be posted soon.

Topics

These will be linked to lecture notes and videos after we teach a given topic. If you want to get a sense of what the class was like last year, check out last year's lectures.

  • 1/13: Course overview + command shell
  • 1/14: Shell tools and scripting
  • 1/15: Editors
  • 1/16: Command-line environment
  • 1/20: (MLK day, no class)
  • 1/21: Data wrangling
  • 1/22: Version control
  • 1/23: Debugging and profiling
  • 1/27: Metaprogramming (build systems, sermver, makefiles, CI)
  • 1/28: Security and privacy
  • 1/29: Potpourri
  • 1/30: Q&A

About the class

Staff: This class is co-taught by Anish, Jon, and Jose.
Questions: Email us at [email protected].

Beyond MIT

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