This course was online, and I found it to be very well organized and fair. Margo is very enthusiastic and she is a fantastic professor :) We used PrarieLearn to complete in-class assignments, labs, pre-class videos, quizzes, and exams. Everything is there, which is super helpful since you only need to check one place for all your assignments, instead of having multiple platforms. There are pre-class videos that you have to watch before class that sets up the upcoming topics that will be discussed in class. They weren't very long, usually about 5-15 mins, depending on the topic. The lecture always felt too short to cover all the materials, as a lot of time is spent in class asking questions since some of the material can get a bit tough and confusing. We got put into breakout rooms in te...read more

Start labs early! Don't leave them to the last minute, especially the ones that include coding! Office hours get super busy close to the deadlines so keep that in mind.

Certainly convinced me that I am terrible at C/C++. The assignments are long and hard, but easier to grasp than those at the end of 213 (but still take a while to finish, start early). The slides of the class are lacking, so go to class and watch the videos. Not very useful or interesting if you don't like systems, an absolute godsend if you are interested in it. Didn't understand much, but it has enough overlap with 213 that I guessed my way through.

This course is not working out for me at all. I took the online version of this course, which seems to contrast the otherwise good experiences my peers had when they took this class in-person in previous years. The material is spread out into different areas: Pre-class, Lecture, In-class and Tutorial, making studying for me very tedious and disorganized. The slides alone don't really have enough information, and I need to watch the video explanation to properly understand them. Even so, the resource used to host these videos is unreliable, with me having dealt with a bunch of 403 errors when trying to watch the lectures. I personally am much more of a person that learns from reading rather than listening, so having to re-watch lecture recordings that sometimes don't work deeply affected m...read more

I would say to take this course in person, not online. If you do anyway, take notes from every part of the course, and be sure to be ready to spend a lot of time watching videos.