Starts out easy with basic memory models, then goes into topics which are more challenging and important. To maximize grade and learning, make sure to do all the assignments. Labs were moderately helpful, but not that much. Take advantage of office hours. Make sure to get comfortable with I/O to synchronization, the last part of the course.

Fun course, learn about the basics of assembly and how computers work at a very low level. You are expected to teach yourself how to work with C for the most part, not *too* hard after CPSC 210. This class taught me that systems were not for me, but I still enjoyed it. Making a brute force hack and learning to defend against it was fun. Favourite part was working with threads and parallel computing, was much harder than I expected and my lab parter practically did all the work. Very assignment heavy, start it early

Pretty useless class if you're not going into embedded system design

Hardware construction

Bo Robert was great, explained everything very well

Understand the assignments and figure out how to code in C

really fun and interesting course. My favorite unit was synchronization and concurrent programming because it is epic. The assignments are definitely the best part; my favorites were implementing malloc/free, writing a virus and hacking a server, playing with a virtual CPU, and writing a thread pool and using it to implement a multi-threaded brute-force password cracker!!

T

This course is pretty damn hard. Assignments are easily the biggest time burner of the course. With that said, I like the way Prof Mike Feeley teaches the course and I enjoyed the course despite it being stressful and strenuous.