In this video, we'll discuss the necessary prerequisites you should have before taking this course, what the course work is going to look like, and finally we'll discuss what software is necessary to complete the coursework. Let's begin with the prerequisites. For beginning, it is expected that you have a basic knowledge of mongoDB and you're familiar with Python, the language of choice throughout this specialization. Specific knowledge of the library that is used later in the course is not required, as we will provide the basics for understanding, though we will not delve too deeply into the art and science of tuning hyper parameters during the machine learning portion. Next, let's talk about the work you'll be doing. Throughout this course, you're going to be watching lesson videos that explain different mongoDB and data science topics. Many of these lessons will be followed by an ungraded quiz to test your understanding of the content in the lesson video. Additionally, you'll be asked to perform practical exercises by downloadable Jupyter notebooks. These will be graded exercises that count towards your grade in the course. Finally, let's discuss the necessary software you'll need to complete those graded notebook exercises. We'll be using Python 3 for our Jupyter notebooks and for the course. We recommend that you install Python 3 in Jupyter by Anaconda. Moreover, Anaconda makes it very easy to have separate Python environments. This will come in handy as you install different Python libraries by Pip. Throughout this course, we'll be using mongoDB Atlas, the easiest way to run mongoDB in a cloud, for many of the lesson exercises. Sometimes you'll be connecting directly to our own Atlas cluster, and other times you'll be connecting to your Atlas cluster. To that end, you'll need to make sure you can connect to Atlas, so make sure there are no firewalls or network restrictions preventing you from doing so. Additionally, you'll need to create a mongoDB Atlas cluster. If that sounded like a lot, have no fear. We have lessons to walk you through all of this. And those are the logistics for the course. Best of luck.