Free online courseOperating Systems and Systems Programming

Course Description

Understanding how an operating system works changes the way you code. Instead of treating your laptop or server as a black box, you start recognizing why programs slow down, how concurrency bugs happen, what the kernel actually does when a process starts, and how storage and networks influence performance. This free online course is designed to help you develop that foundation and turn it into practical systems programming intuition that you can apply in real projects, technical interviews, and day-to-day engineering work.

You will explore the core ideas that make modern computing reliable and efficient: the separation between user code and the kernel, the abstractions that let software share hardware safely, and the lifecycle of threads and processes. From there, the course connects concepts to the tools and mechanisms you meet in Unix-like environments, including system calls and the models used for communication between programs. Along the way, you will learn why synchronization primitives exist, how to reason about mutual exclusion and waiting, and how monitors and other coordination techniques shape correct concurrent programs.

The course also strengthens your ability to think like the OS when performance matters. Scheduling policies reveal trade-offs between responsiveness and throughput, while deadlock discussions teach you how systems get stuck and how engineers design to avoid it. Memory management topics tie together address translation, virtual memory, caching behavior, and the practical impact of demand paging. These ideas directly influence how you write scalable software, troubleshoot resource issues, and interpret what operating system metrics are telling you.

Finally, you will connect storage, file systems, and reliability concepts to real-world engineering constraints, then extend that mindset into networking and distributed systems. You will see how systems maintain consistency, why protocols exist for coordination, and how design principles influence end-to-end reliability. By the end, you will have a coherent mental model of how applications, kernels, and hardware collaborate—making you more effective whether you are targeting backend services, embedded environments, IT support paths, or deeper systems roles.