We rely on thousands of tools to do our work: compilers, editors, audio and video codecs, data compression formats, and so on. Many of these tools are clever or well-designed or both. By examining how they work, we can see the design insights behind them while simultaneously making them less mysterious.

All computing systems follow definite rules, both in theory and in practice, in the realms of both computer science and everyday programming. In an hour and a half of dense screencasts, we get a high-level view of major computational topics demonstrated using code, not mathematical notation.