This class teaches you a lot about networking which is very useful for IST. It's a lot of hands-on work with Wireshark and building diagrams for networks.

Heavy on quizzes and weekly assignments. A final group project that was around 30 pages discussed designing a network for a business. It wasn't bad as long as you have a decent group. There is a lot of reading but a lot of it isnt necessary.

Professor Lipton teaches high level IST classes so he doesn't pay much attention to this class.

Knowledge of cloudshark would be helpful but not necessary.