IT Playbook
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What IT Playbook is
Tech courses that work like narrated books. You read, listen or both, play with live diagrams, and check yourself with a quiz on every lesson and a flashcard deck for every course. This page covers how the courses are built and kept current, the part AI plays, who they are for, and who is behind them.
What it is
IT Playbook is a catalogue of IT courses: cloud, Linux, networking, containers, infrastructure as code, security, databases, programming, testing and AI. Some start from zero; others are deep dives for people who already work in the field. Each course is a book you can read, listen to, or both.
The catalogue keeps growing. Every course is in the course list, with its level and its number of lessons and hours.
One membership unlocks every course, including the ones added later. The Introduction, the whole first chapter and every chapter Overview of each course are free to anyone, and one beginner course a month is free in full with a free account. See What is free.
How the courses work
A course opens with an Introduction: what it covers, who it is for, what you should know first, and a map of its chapters. Each chapter starts with an Overview, then its lessons, and the course ends with its Flashcards page. See Lessons.
- Narration. Every page is narrated sentence by sentence by two AI voices, one female and one male. What makes them right for IT is the preparation behind them: every command, acronym, file name and symbol the narrator says has an explicit reading, so
kubectl,nginxandYAMLcome out the way an engineer says them. Pick either voice, set the speed from 0.7× to 1.5×, add a pause after each sentence, or have every paragraph read a second time. The text being read is highlighted as it goes. See Listening. - Live diagrams. Hundreds of figures are interactive: move a slider, pick an option or step through an animation, and the figure changes with it. Many other diagrams label their parts when you point at them. See Live figures.
- Terms. Important terms are highlighted where they first appear on a page, and their definition opens on the spot. See Term tooltips.
- A quiz on every lesson. The Knowledge Check at the end of each lesson has three to seven questions, and every option explains why it is right or wrong. You pass when every answer is right. See The Knowledge Check.
- A flashcard deck for every course. Built from the course's glossary and scheduled by spaced repetition, so a card comes back just before you would forget it. See Flashcards.
Three kinds of progress
Getting through a lesson is not the same as being able to prove it, so progress is tracked three ways, and you always see all three:
- Learned: lessons whose narration you have heard in full. Reading a page without playing it is not tracked.
- Quizzes: lessons whose Knowledge Check you have passed.
- Flashcards: how much of the course's deck you know now.
Pass every quiz and know every card, and the course is finished: you get a medal and a certificate with your name on it. Listening is not required. Signed in, your progress follows your account to every device. See Learned, Quizzes and Flashcards.
Kept current
IT moves fast, and an out-of-date tutorial is worse than none. Once a month every course in the catalogue is checked against the official documentation of the tools it teaches, and whatever has changed is fixed.
Each course card shows the result with a month:
- Updated, such as Updated September 2026: that month's check found something and the course was changed.
- Verified: that month's check found nothing to correct.
- Created: the course has not been through its first monthly check yet, and the month is when it was written.
About the AI
Yes, a lot of AI goes into this. A whole fleet of AI agents helps me draft the courses, check them against the documentation and keep them up to date, and the narration is spoken by AI voices. But nothing ships on autopilot: my commitment is that every change is reviewed by a human before it reaches you.
If you still find something wrong, please tell me: see Feedback.
Who it is for
Anyone who wants to understand the technology that runs modern software, whether this is your first serious stack, a switch into a new field, or closing a specific gap. No gatekeeping: start wherever you are.
Each card shows the course's level. The beginner courses start from zero; the deep dives expect you to be comfortable reading a little code and to know the basics of how software runs. Every course opens with an Introduction that says who it is for and what you should already know, and a course that builds on another names it on its card as Start with that course. On your dashboard, Paths puts the courses for the role you want in order.
How IT Playbook started
Honestly, this began as a tool for myself. I was prepping for job interviews and wanted to go through dense technical material the way I actually learn best: reading and listening at the same time, at my own pace, with a quick quiz after each topic to make it stick (in my experience, quizzes are what do that). I couldn't find anything that worked like that, so I built a rough, bare-bones version just for me. I showed it to a few friends, they liked it far more than I expected, and they're the ones who talked me into making it public.
Feedback
Got an idea, a correction, or a course you'd love to see? Send it through Support. Any signed-in account can use the form, free or paid, and the reply comes by email. You can also write to support@itplaybook.org. I read everything.
More ways to get help are in Getting help.