How to use IT Playbook

Everything the platform can do, in one place — the lessons, the player, quizzes, how progress is tracked, your daily goal, what's free, and how billing works. Skim the contents below, or read it top to bottom.

1. Getting started

Open the catalog and pick a course. Every course begins with an Introduction that lays out what it covers, who it's for, and what you should know first — if it isn't the right fit, it points you to a course that is. You can start reading straight away; no account is needed to try a course (see What's free). To save your progress, take quizzes, and unlock everything, sign in with Google and start a free trial.

2. What's free

You can read a meaningful slice of every course without paying, and there's always one full course free for members:

• Open to everyone, no account: each course's introduction, its entire first chapter, every chapter's overview page, and the first lesson of chapters 2 and 3. Enough to judge the depth and style before you commit.
• Free course of the month: one beginner course is unlocked in full for every signed-in member each month, and it rotates — so there's always something new to work through at no cost. You'll see it in a banner on the home page and a “Free in <month>” badge on its card. Sign in to unlock it.

Everything else is part of the subscription, which starts with a 7-day free trial (see Plans & billing). Locked lessons show a small lock in the sidebar.

3. Reading & listening

Each course works like a narrated book. Every sentence is narrated by professional-grade AI voices trained on technical material, so you can read, listen, or do both at once — whatever helps it stick. As the audio plays, the current sentence is highlighted and the page scrolls to keep it in view. Illustrations are often interactive: hover or tap parts of a diagram for extra detail.

4. The player

Inside a lesson, the audio bar at the bottom is built for learning, not just playback. From it you can:

• Play / pause the narration, and jump to the previous or next sentence.
• Restart the lesson from the first sentence.
• Change the speed — slow it down to absorb, speed it up to review.
• Add a pause between sentences, so you have a beat to think before the next one.
• Toggle the sentence highlight and auto-scroll if you'd rather read undisturbed.
• Collapse the bar when you just want the page.

Every course is narrated by a professional-grade female voice today; a male voice is coming, and on courses that offer more than one you'll be able to switch right from the player. The defaults these controls start from are set in Settings.

5. Term tooltips

The first time an important term appears in a course, it's lightly underlined. Hover or tap it for a short, plain-language definition — no need to leave the page or guess what a word means. If you're listening, the narration pauses briefly so you can read the definition; you can turn that pause off from the audio bar.

6. Flashcards

Every course ends with Flashcards — the last item in the course sidebar. Each important term from the course becomes a card: the front shows the explanation, and tapping the card (or pressing Space) flips it to the term it belongs to. Then you grade yourself honestly with two stacked buttons — I know this (or ↑, the card flies up) and Don't know yet (or ↓, the card flies down and returns a few cards later). On a phone, swipe the card up or down. The session starts the moment you open the page, with the cards you're closest to forgetting first.

Under the hood the deck is scheduled by FSRS, the modern spaced-repetition algorithm (the one behind current Anki). Every grade updates a per-card memory model, and each card comes back just before you'd forget it: a card you know keeps moving further into the future — days, then weeks, then months — and a card you miss comes back tomorrow. The button even tells you when the card would return. That's why the flashcards page is worth revisiting: in the sidebar, two thin bars show your vocabulary at a glance — green for the share of terms you currently remember and amber for the ones due for review. Left alone, the green bar slowly shrinks as memories fade on schedule; a short review tops it back up. When cards fall due, your dashboard also nudges you with a “Flashcards · N to review” chip on that course.

Which way round you're asked is yours to choose: Ask me for in the player settings offers Term (the default — you see the explanation and name the term), Explanation (the classic direction: you see the term and say what it means) and Mixed, which flips a coin for each card so you can do it either way. The schedule below is the same either way — a card is one term, however it was asked. Note the setting is named for what the card asks you for, not for what it shows first, and like your flashcard progress it's remembered per device — so a phone and a laptop can be set differently.

Cards are read aloud with the same narration voice as the lessons — the question side when a card appears, the answer when it flips — controlled by the Read cards toggle in the player settings (it follows your Autoplay default). Under the card there's a small timeout slider: leave it at “No timeout”, or give yourself 3–30 seconds to recall — a countdown line runs across the card and it flips itself when time is up. Beside the progress bar there's a Shuffle button: every session is dealt in a random order already, but a card you keep missing is put back only a couple of cards later, so a stubborn handful can start to feel like a loop — Shuffle re-deals whatever is left of the session. Nothing is graded or re-scheduled by it, and the cards you've already cleared stay cleared. Flashcard progress is stored on the device you study on.

7. Quizzes

Every lesson ends with a short knowledge check — a few multiple-choice questions on what you just covered. Each answer explains why it's right or wrong, so a wrong pick still teaches you something. Passing it counts toward your Quizzes progress (below). Getting through a lesson and being able to prove it are two different things — the quiz is how you prove it.

8. Learned, Quizzes & Flashcards

When you're signed in, the platform tracks your progress in a course three separate ways, so "I read it" and "I can prove it" never get confused:

• Learned — the lessons whose narration you've read or heard in full.
• Quizzes — the lessons where you've passed the quiz (proved by quiz).
• Flashcards — how much of the course's vocabulary you've mastered (proved by flashcards, see Flashcards).

You always see all three, because reading isn't the same as proving it. Learned and Quizzes are measured against the course's teaching lessons (the numbered topics), so those two bars share the same scale; Flashcards is measured against the course's glossary terms.

In the course contents. The sidebar carries the first two of those per lesson: an amber headphone where you've heard every sentence of the lesson, and a green tick where you've passed its quiz. The tick replaces the headphone, because passing the quiz is the stronger claim. Chapters roll the same thing up onto their own row, so a chapter that's folded shut still tells you where it stands — a thin amber bar down the left edge of the chapter means every page in it has been heard in full, and a thin green bar means every lesson's quiz is passed. Green replaces amber there too.

Taking a course again. At the bottom of the course contents, under Flashcards, there's Reset progress. It clears every lesson's tick, your quiz results and your place in the course, so you can work through it from the start; a checkbox in the confirmation decides whether your flashcard schedule for that course starts over too. Your day streak, activity graph and streak freezes are untouched — you did study on those days. So are your achievements: a course you've finished stays finished, so your medal stays and your certificate stays available, whether or not you'd claimed it before the reset.

9. Your dashboard

Your dashboard is home base once you sign in. It shows:

• Resume — pick up exactly where you left off, with Learned, Quizzes and Flashcards bars for that course.
• Your courses — everything you've started, with progress at a glance.
• Activity heatmap — a calendar of what you've done, coloured by Learned vs. Quizzes days.
• Achievements — a medal for each course you've fully mastered: every quiz passed and every flashcard learned. The medal appears the moment you earn it and stays even if a flashcard later falls due for review. Click it to open your certificate.
• Streak — how many days in a row you've hit your daily goal (next section).

10. Medals & certificates

Finish a course — every quiz passed and every flashcard known — and a medal appears under Achievements on your dashboard. Listening isn't required: if you read the lessons and proved it on the quizzes, you've earned it. The same small medal is stamped on the course's card wherever it appears on your dashboard, so a finished course is recognisable at a glance in the catalogue.

When you're one half away, the card you resume from says so — “Every quiz passed. Master 236 flashcards and the certificate is yours.” — so it's never a guess which piece is still outstanding. It also speaks up if you've learned every lesson but haven't done the quizzes or the deck: finishing the last lesson feels like finishing the course, and this is the nudge that says what the certificate actually goes by. Mid-course it stays quiet; the reminder only appears once it's within reach. If study reminders are switched on, the same line travels in the email.

Click the medal to open your certificate of completion. It carries your name, the course, its length and the date you finished, and it lives at its own web address — so you can send that link to anyone, and they can open it without an IT Playbook account. There's a Copy link button on the certificate, and Print / save as PDF if you'd rather attach a file.

The name on it comes from your profile, so set it the way you want to be credited before you claim one — Settings → Profile → Display name. If you change it later, open the certificate again from the medal and it updates in place; the link stays the same.

One certificate per course, and it doesn't expire: it records that you completed the course on that date, so it stands even if flashcards later come due for review again.

11. Daily goal & streak

Set a daily goal in Settings → Learning profile. It has two halves, and a day counts only when you've done both:

• Read — lessons (quizzes) passed, 1 to 10 a day, or whole chapters completed if you switch the mode. Defaults to one lesson.
• Review — flashcards answered that day, across any course. Defaults to 10; set it to 0 if you'd rather the streak ignored flashcards.

Reading alone is how you finish a course and remember none of it, which is why the second half is there.

Your streak is the number of consecutive days you've met that goal. When you hit it, a small 🔥 appears next to your name in the top bar (on every page) and your streak ticks up. Miss a day and the streak resets — so the goal is best set to something you can realistically keep.

Streak freeze. Some days you simply can't study, and a run you've kept for weeks shouldn't die over one of them. Freezes are shown as a snowflake next to the flame on your streak card, and there is nothing to press: miss a day and a freeze is spent for you, automatically, and your streak carries on.

Each one is dearer than the last: the first arrives after 10 days of studying, the second 11 days after that, the third 12 days after that — so you'll have three at 33 days, five at 60, and ten at 145. Insurance is cheap when the habit is new and one missed day would end it, and it gets steadily harder to stockpile as the run grows.

A freeze keeps the run alive but does not add to the number — your streak counts the days you actually studied, so it stays where your work left it. Go away for a week and you'll spend exactly as many freezes as days you miss; if they run out mid-trip, the streak ends on the first day nothing covers. Freezes belong to your current run, so if the streak does break, the count starts again from zero.

12. Settings

Open Settings from the menu under your name. There you can:

• Learning profile — set your experience level and the topics you care about (this adds a Recommended sort to your catalog that leads with courses that fit you), and set your daily goal.
• Player defaults — the speed, inter-sentence pause, highlight, and auto-scroll that every new lesson starts from.
• Appearance — switch between light and dark, and size the reading text up or down.
• Account — your name, and your subscription & billing.

Study reminders are on the way; when they land you'll be able to opt in here.

13. Devices & sync

IT Playbook runs in any modern browser — phone, tablet, or desktop — with no app to install. Sign in and your progress, your place in each course, your settings, your daily goal, and your streak follow you across all of them.

14. Plans & billing

One membership unlocks every course. It's $16/month or $120/year, and both plans are launch-priced at 50% off your first year — $8/month or $60/year — applied automatically at checkout, with no code to enter. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial; cancel during the trial and pay nothing.

You can change your plan or payment method, or cancel, anytime from Settings. If you cancel, you keep access through the end of the period you've already paid for. New courses land every month and are always included — you never pay extra for them.

15. Staying current

Out-of-date tech material is worse than none, so every course is checked against the official documentation and updated whenever the tools change. Each course card shows when it was last reviewed. A fleet of AI agents helps draft and maintain the courses, but nothing ships on autopilot — every change is reviewed by a human before it reaches you.

16. Getting help

Found an error, have a suggestion, or want a course that doesn't exist yet? Signed-in members can reach us through Support — we read all of it, and corrections often ship in the next monthly update. For quick answers, the FAQ covers the common questions.

Browse the catalog →