# Introduction

Gentle reader, 

Welcome to this Plutus course. The course aims to teach you the basics of Plutus for Cardano smart contract development. This course will use `PlutusV2` and the latest `cardano-node` version (`8.1.2`). To get the most out of the course, it is recommended to have an understanding of the fundamentals of Haskell and the basic usage of `cardano-cli`. To get started with Haskell, you may want to follow the [Introduction to Haskell video series](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAoT_AQC5nO_2bMR85RJksJgcKlvIRKRQ) or [the GitBook version of the course](https://haskell.hpmeducation.com/).

Before starting any practical work with the so-called smart contracts, it is extremely important to have a good understanding of the underlying accounting model used on Cardano - the Extended Unspent Transaction Output model called EUTxO.