R02: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1986)

To complete this reading assignment, you should watch a 72-minute YouTube video of a famous introductory computer science course in 1986. The link is at the bottom of these instructions, but don't click it yet.

When you are watching videos for this class (or any other class that has video readings), make sure you know how to control the playback speed. In YouTube, you an access the speed controls in the gear icon in the bottom-right of the video window.

You may be tempted to just let the video play at 1x speed while you get distracted doing something else. Instead, try out active viewing on this video. Set the speed to something like 1.5x or 2x, and hit F to full-screen the video. While the video is playing, keep your hands hovering over the keyboard so that you are ready to hit K to pause the video or J and L to jump back and forth 10 seconds at a time when you need to go back and re-listen to a segment.

After you've skimmed the video (using keyboard controls, not clumsily clicking into the timeline with a mouse). Open up the text textual transcript for the video. In the "..." menu underneath the video (right-hand side), select "Open transcript". This will pop up a box of scrolling text to the right. One the text is on the screen, you can use your browser's built-in search functionality to find keywords in the video (Ctrl-F on Windows, Cmd-F on macOS) and click to jump to the precise point in the video where a topic is mentioned. Now you can skim and jump through video readings as easily as you can for text readings!

(Watch out -- the text transcript for many videos on YouTube is automatically generated and thus not very accurate.) 

By the way, you can also use , and . (comma and period) keys in YouTube to seek through a video frame-by-frame. This is useful when you want to read background text in a moving scene or when you want to pick the perfect frame for a screenshot. The < and > keys (shift-comma and shift-period on most keyboards) let you control the playback speed without reaching for the menu with your mouse.

If you are using the Chrome browser, I recommend installing the Video Speed Controller extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk?hl=en). This will give you fine-grained speed and seeking controls for any video that plays in the browser, not just those on YouTube where the shortcuts mention above worked.

Okay, now you're ready to spend less-than-an-hour watching this more-than-an-hour video:
Lecture 1A | MIT 6.001 Structure and Interpretation, 1986