The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

IAP 2026

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.

These days, many aspects of software engineering are also in flux through the introduction of AI-enabled and AI-enhanced tools and workflows. When used appropriately and with awareness of their shortcomings, these can often provide significant benefits to CS practitioners and are thus worth developing working knowledge of. Since AI is a cross-functional enabling technology, there is not a standalone AI lecture; we’ve instead folded the use of the latest applicable AI tools and techniques into each lecture directly.

Read about the motivation behind this class.

Registration

Sign up for the IAP 2026 class by filling out this registration form.

Schedule

Lecture: 35-225, 1:30–2:30pm (exception: 3–4pm on Friday 1/16)
Discussion: OSSU Discord, in #missing-semester

We are still finalizing the syllabus for the IAP 2026 offering, so the topics we cover may change slightly.

If you can’t wait until January 2026, you can also take a look at the lectures from the previous offering of the course, which covers many of the same topics.

About the class

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

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

Translations

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!

Acknowledgments

We thank Luis Turino / SIPB for supporting this class as part of SIPB IAP 2026.

Source code.

Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.

See here for contribution & translation guidelines.