Genuinely the worst course I ever took. Jordon is no help, and so is the rest of the teaching team. Not letting us see our exams is a pointless and foolish rule. Perhaps the reason is to cover up all of the crucial and misleading mistakes that are included in the exam questions.

Teaches stuff that won't really be used for many jobs. Assignments are super heavy. midterms are unnecessarily hard.

registers, memory, threading

mumbles in the preclass video recordings but I don't know about in person.

Do not take more than 4 classes at once when taking this.

Very hard course and useful for CPSC 313. Might not use this course as a web developer though.

Assembly, threads, C

Helped on piazza. Lots of TAs on piazza

Take time to learn C. Starts assignments very early. It can take a week to complete the assignments.

Pretty hard and heavy workload. As long as you are not falling behind and start early on assignments, you'll do well

Content was very interesting and pretty useful for CPSC313.

Prof was good and helpful on piazza. Exams were more on the fair to hard side.

Start early on assignments and go to OH. Try not to fall behind and prepare to spend lots of time on this class during the weeks. Try not to take it along with CPSC 221 as well.

needlessly difficult

irrelevant

rude

avoid unless required

Lectures aren't recorded so you can't rewatch them if you missed something. The professors are usually not helpful on Piazza. When asked about midterm cutoffs, they send you to read a syllabus containing the term schedule that conflicts with what is labeled as examinable content on PrarieLearn. Assignments take ages and solidify knowledge that is half irrelevant to exams.

His teaching style doesn't help you understand the already difficult content. Often ramble about things not on the slides, and since the lectures aren't recorded, you'll never know what he said if you missed it.

Just don't if you don't have to

hate my life

hate my life

hate my life

hate my life

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.

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.