There are quizzes and they do take time to get right. This class can teach beginners a fair amount without unnecessary pain. You can even google if you cant find a clear answer from the lectures. The TAs are in the slack channel, be sure to join, but be careful of what you share. Good summer class. The project TA Jeffrey had wonderful knowledge on the subject and was extremely helpful. Exam wise, they grade fairly. Each project was progressively more difficult, but nothing too overwhelming. At least 100 unique questions went unanswered on EdStem this semester. The projects are a joke; a couple hours a piece. Tests included short answer and multiple choice questions and I found the difficulty level to increase from test 1 to test 3. Were only about 3/4 through the course, but I feel thats enough to give a (somewhat) comprehensive review of the course. The course has changed somewhat since the lectures were recorded about 6 years ago. The class is just designed to make it hard to do well. I learned a good bit and while I wouldnt necessarily use the information I gained in real-world scenarios, I enjoyed everything. I found the lectures very informative, the quizzes at their best made you go learn new things and at their worst confused the heck out of you with vague and imprecise language. Id recommend it as a first class to prime yourself for OMSCS or if you happen to have an interest in some low-level concepts in computer networking. Tests were okay but some questions felt very nitpicky. (~8 hours including paper reading), Assignment 6: SDN Firewall - implement a firewall using pyretic - very little programming involved (probably under 30 lines). There were a number of papers to read (I liked them, some didnt). Perhaps a project focusing on implementing Dijkstras Algorithm? I liked the course, in particular, the content about SDN, Security, and Censorship was interesting (but not practical for a software engineer). The projects were also quite manageable, given sufficient time; 2 and 3 were among the most challenging, but its pretty smooth sailing after that front-loaded difficulty. Added to that the Slack chats are also very helpful. This clas needed the most time in writing the Python assignments. Specific input and output, which make us no zoom to walk. We could never complete this in a weekend. This was my first class, and I enjoyed it ! Overall, a decent class. I fully admit that Im not a fan of memorization type tests, which is what this class did. Ill preface by saying, I got a top grade in this class (like many others Id assume). Includes real-world examples. Educational and I learned alot, granted I didnt know anything about networks going in. Overall - I almost hate to say it but this course is worth taking for the projects and the TAs. The projects were not difficult, but I dont feel that they added anything to my understanding of the concepts. This courses primary quality issue is the final project. CON: While the video lectures were good, they did not provide the depth required for this class. The actual coding part is easy. I found projects projects 2 & 3 and the Extra credit section on project 7 to be most time consuming. I am happy to have taken this class because the TAs were appreciative. Hope this helps someone make the decision to take this class. Each time, they were met with a shrug or a reason why the students concerns were invalid. Took this course to learn about networking in general, and because it was rated as an easy class and I wanted to chill. Most projects are not challenging and the exams are checking your memorization instead of your understanding of the concepts. Although, I did feel some of the questions were poorly worded and created some ambiguity. Lectures are literally just a wall of text. I liked the projects a lot more than just the lectures/tests/and readings. Lectures are interesting, but the assignments not so much. Released 3/28 Took Computer Networks as my first course in OMSCS and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the content and the general interaction between students and faculty (professor and TAs). If you watch the lecture videos carefully, the programming assignments are straightforward. The study guide provided on piazza for the two exams are helpful. If you count the time required to finish the group projects and the time required to watch the udacity lectures and read the papers, is around 18 hours per week. Sounds obvious, right? 70% projects, 30% exams. Second test covered lots of material and heavy on the grade 30%. The tests cover some detailed stuff, so good study practices are necessary. The head-TA (Stacia) was very responsive and definitely deserves recognition for how well she ran the course. Next semerster should have a new VM which I hear is better. Disappointingly some of that extra credit was awarded to the whole class because the professor screwed up. There was no leadership from the TAs; not something entirely expected but it really hurt the course. It is an Intro. Videos are good and helpful. I appreciate the weekly office hours. 7 Projects with 3 tests. The TAs (and Maria) were pretty responsive on Piazza, and held weekly office hours. Since I was only reading the lectures before exams, that left a lot of free time. The main complaint was sometimes the questions/instructions were a little ambiguous. The projects are fun, and shouldnt be a problem if you know Python (an absolute must for this class). Like other classes in this program, the projects seem to be TA written. Its throwaway nonsense. I was very neutral to disappointed on the (3) exams. This was my favorite project and probably the one that took me the least amount of time. Make sure to give yourself enough time to watch the lectures and read the articles. Very well written documentation, and the tutorial video is great. A plus point is that TA are very active on slack, specially James answer almost every question on slack and is available there most of the time. The course consisted of two tests (82%, 75%) which were fair, but the 2nd test covered a rather large amount of research paper information that was difficult to digest. Took me a bit of time due to user-errors in my implementation but once I realized my mistakes it was easy to fix. There are other posts that have described the projects + amount of time + the approx number of lines of code (if any )needed etc. I do wonder if theres a way to improve the teaching of the material so that students HAD to understand these concepts to get a good grade. Some of the assignments were easy and some were average to difficult. Fairly boring lectures, very dry material. The quizzes are easy. Im quite experienced in Networking and this course was pretty easy for me. .assignment-8. What you get out of this class depends on what you put into it, and this means reading the referenced papers, watching the videos, and reviewing all of the mininet programming (not just what youre assigned to work on). The first two projects are probably the hardest of the semester, but both can be completed with around 50 lines of code. That being said, most of the lasting concepts I learned from this class were not directly from the lecture material, but from the paper readings and other background readings on this topic. The projects were interesting as well as the material. Exams are not open book and they use HonorLock. I also think this class desperately needs a final exam to students can have some incentive to watch the lectures, as they are not really necessary to do the assignments. This course requires reading of published papers apart from video lectures (which I found not rich in details - might be a problem for students not exposed to networking concepts earlier from school / work). I use to troubleshoot spanning-tree issues in the past, so I enjoyed building the algorithm from the ground up and seeing it operate instead. Also, since this was the first semester they were running the re-done course, there were mistakes here and there and some unclear parts of assignments and exams. Personally, I found the BGPM and the Openflow projects hard. My assessment was correct. Imagine a high school, that has no experience teaching online, is suddenly forced to create content within a week for students because of the pandemic. The assignments are kind of hard to read. Exam 1 (10%): This exam covered lessons 1-4. You do learn a lot about both the historical and modern concepts of network programming. Im in this class now (Spring 2020), but know registration is going on and wanted to provide feedback on the re-vamped class. youre expected to already be familiar with the ins and outs of the OSI model, inner workings of TCP, etc.). (~5-7 hours). I found the course moderately difficult - not because of the material but for the delivery of it. I was not a fan of the lectures by the previous professor who left Georgia Tech for Princeton a few years back (and now at UChicago). I loved it. Lectures: Decent content but not really engaging. GT should provide some automated grading framework like web-cat to handle that load instead of TAs writing custom, fragile auto graders. Dont be fooled by the early reviews - its not an easy class, it has morphed to be about medium difficulty and time - but it is predictable and well-tuned. With a networking background, I thought Id enjoy this class. Its shows that the workload is less than software analysis and design which is untrue. You will emerge with no practical or theoretical network skills, but rather briefly knowing a few disparate random facts about networks that you will forget in a week. General configuration Class is broken up into 7 projects that total 70% of your grade, two honorlock-proctored exams at 10% of your grade each that cover the first and second half of the course content (aka, not cummulative), and a bunch of open book quizzes that total 10% of your grade. The best projects were the hard ones (which were the last 3) you will definitely spend a lot of time on these if you dont know data structures, python APIs, and reading the 30 page documentation for one of the projects. The quizzes were fairly easy, asking questions from within the modules. I personally didnt really need help for projects, but it was bizarre seeing posts removed for giving too much away when they were discussing completely trivial or arbitrary parts of the project. Had an extra credit task (3%). Some of the projects may be just a tad stressful. Some of the labs are fun, some seem to be more tedious. The multi-select questions on the tests were extremely tough as many of the possible answers seemed applicable. They hold office hours every single week and go through all of the projects in EXTREME detail (to the point that you already have a pseudocode skeleton). Grading for the homework is sometimes nonsensical as well. She appeared once to ask why we were interested in the course. Programming assignments were in Python. Overall I learned a lot from the class, Id say its medium/hard difficulty, but dont think this is an easy class that you can pair with a more difficult class. I didnt learn much from this course. Hopefully the TAs held on to those projects and will distribute to later semesters. Time spent ~25 hours, They give out an exam guide with summarized questions which are useful in gauging exam preparedness. Youd have to reset your device each time you made a firewall policy change. The Exams: There was a midterm and a final. Or to then have them request you copy and paste output from a terminal, only to find out that they watned MORE than they explicicity asked for is bad. The assignments are fairly straightforward if you spend time beforehand to understand the material. Some of the content was wrong in the slides. The projects and reading was interesting and I learned a lot. Mistakes happen, but after all the anguish displayed about how hard exams are to make, it doesnt seem like enough review time was given to any of them. The only thing I am still waiting on is grade for the 5th project BGPM, so final grade still up in the air. TAs and instructor were very accessible also during Core Hours, although quite strict on Piazza about not sharing ANY code, not even a sample of a Python API call they expect the students to work it out themselves. The professor, M. Konte, is a internet security researcher, and the weekly office hours are a chance to pick her brain on stuff. Basic python coding is needed. Otherwise, it was nicely paced. (This was a common response referring to tests in T-Square). That said, I found the projects relatively straightforward even from a non-CS background who doesnt even work in the software industry. I feel lucky we had some talkative classmates. Overall: CN was a well-structured course with engaging projects, fair exams, and decent modules/lectures. I find a lot of topics naturally interesting, and I came in knowing very little about computer networks. There are a lot of false negatives due to the need for continuous reboot of both your Mininet network and the VM. There were two tests for the summer semester and they werent awful as long as you were very thorough in your studying. Computer Networks is an interesting and important field of study within Computer Science. Lectures: The lectures were much shorter than the other courses Ive taken (ESO, SAT, HPCA, IOS), and they werent always clear, but the material is very interesting for someone like me who has very little networking experience. I often had to repeat each lesson 2-3 times to really capture and/or understand some of the concepts. The most complex code youll write is a loop. There was no team work either, which I believe is really important for such classes as we learn from each other. Overall I enjoyed the course and thought the topics were interesting. Suggestion to all future students of this class would be to study Python and become quite proficeint prior to taking the class. If you make it past this project, 12-16 hours in two weeks, its downhill from here. they use a DNS concept earlier in the class but we dont properly learn DNS until the last couple modules in the class, Aja and James really keep the class together, very prompt and thorough, Do a good job being fair with regrade requests, Overall, the projects are actually pretty good. Cest La Vie. Failed to load latest commit information. This is perhaps the most egregious downside of this class, although I fear it is more of a university-wide issue. Or guessing. First course I completed. Regret taking this class and didnt learn anything. Use office hours effectively! Exam 2 is not cumulative, which is nice. The assigned papers are optional and can help give more understanding and background if you have time and want more depth. All these issues mean that there is a large backlog of questions from students on Piazza, and the TAs have a hard time keeping up. There were several tasks to be completed to plot graphs on the routing information collected. Exams - Still havent taken the final yet, but the first exam was OK, nothing brutal but my only gripe is that if you didnt understand a concept, you may miss several questions as they typically built upon each other. Across the board at GA Tech, youre expected to already know how to program and if not, be able to pick up a given language to complete the assignment. It was purely code based this semester and the script made it easy to verify results. Her responses on EdStem during BGPM really helped me. So I see where we stand. Partial credit is given for questions where more than one answer can be selected. I took this course without any computer network background. However, I found that the STP portion of the lecture content was way more helpful in showing me how to derive a working implementation. This was a challenging but very enlightening course. Book was somewhat helpful but not entirely relevant. The hard part with the programming assignments was that they were auto-graded with minimal viewing of the code so a simple mistake could cause significant issues on the grade. After taking this things got slightly easier. Such observation could be biased because I took IOS and got some programming experience. My mind will go down, =======Configuration requirements======= Definitely recommend doing the extra credit as it can help out by a half letter grade (6% of possible extra credt). already knows the mechanics of TCP, IP, AIMD, etc. Assignments are well planned, they have made extra efforts to create videos that explains projects. I took this course because I was anticipating a very challenging Fall at work. The Udacity versions are much more engaging than the videos that have been recorded for this class. This is a very good course to take. The code quality was not great; at least one had mixed spaces and tabs, there were numerous typos and misspellings, code commented out that was presumably meant to be deleted, but just overlooked which caused a lot of questions on slack. Most lectures are just text pages to read through or the instructor reading the same write-up from a script in a monotone voice. The median grade on all assignments was 100%. It would be awesome if this class had an autograder, but the TAs have said thats unlikely due to technical short comings with Gradescope (root issues). Not much, but a good idea to engage user feedback. hack the planet. Just do not think you are walking into an easy A. This was a pretty simple course that teaches you everything thats important in networking. The projects were enjoyable and low maintenance but I honestly dont think you need to watch the lectures to get them done. Spanning Tree Protocol - Tests your algorithms, make sure you apply yourself and follow the walkthrough. The hardest assignments ultimately required no more than 50 lines of pretty straightforward code, so if it takes you 15 hours, its because you didnt completely understand the requirements before starting to write code. Easy and well organized course in general. It took a bit to get my head around the SDN project, but I was able to work through it thanks to the annotated documentation provided by the instruction team. I also liked the videos but like others, they arent really required for the assignments. Learned a lot. They are extremely friendly and responsive. If you have questions, I recommend attending the office hours and/or the TA chats that were hosted. So 12% extra grade was just ridiculous and made the class too easy to get an A. This is Fall 2017. I do not have a lot more to add about the other projects. There were some new projects that had a couple of growing pains, but they worked with the class on them. There was the opportunity to get some extra credit in case you really messed up a project. So the flows which we used are exactly as they are in the real world. My overall impression is that this is a low quality course (compared to others in OMSCS) that is only worth it if you need an easy A (and it was an easy A for me). For the life of me, I cannot fathom why anyone would give this course a positive review. So the class definitely ran into problems mid semester. There are some tedious aspects to it, but I found it overall interesting. Even with my poor test scores, my final grade so far is in the high 90s because Ive gotten full points on the projects so far. In my opinion data processing, visualization skills are very different from software engineering skills for developing apps or systems, and could involve a ton of topics that this class should not and cannot cover such as Hadoop, Spark, Mapreduce etc. You can pick it up in the course, not heavily get used. I got to learn about SDN, and it was very interesting. The exception to this being BGP Measurements project which involved using an API to analyze BGP data and develop key insights from. AFAIK there is no professor supervising the TAs and there has been some snark on Piazza between the students and the TAs. Easy Course, Interesting Projects, Boring Modules. However, when you get to the quizzes, it sometimes requires you to review the lectures for a second time since the lectures can explain concepts pretty fast or go to external references to determine the answer. bachelor of computer science This class is NOT easy by any stretch of the imagination. I was surprised by the amount of griping about the assignments. Instead, the current TAs are locked out of the Udacity backend and have to create their own autograding system and quiz questions from scratch. I wouldve expected the projects to be more challenging considering my undergraduate Computer Networks class involved implementing a subset of functionality for an FTP server in C, given only the RFC document. I didnt look at a single one of the readings and Im still on course for an A on every assignment and exam so far. There is no Gradescope nor any autograder, so nobody checks your code before you submit it. I thoroughly enjoyed this class. Despite this, the lectures were well organized and went well above and beyond my undergraduate course content on the same subject. All projects have either an autograder or a tool to check your work, use them. The coursework isnt much better, because they use an autograder, the submitted files have to be very exact. TAs were helpful on Piazza. Extra credits project IWEEC requires you to take some famous internet incidents around the world, collect related data and plot a graph. I did learn more about specific topics during the lectures notes and they were somewhat necessary for some quiz questions. People should know this is NOT the easy class that past reviews says it is! Except for the final project, that is. You will enjoy the class and if you are comfortable with python and know basics about networking you will learn new things and it will be an easy class for you. Between the lectures, papers, and projects a lot of information is thrown at you. For those who use these reviews to pick an easy course, please note that this course changes significantly from semester to semester, using student feedback, so only use recent reviews. If I didnt know Python, this would have been much more difficult for me. If you want to learn Computer Networks, I feel like it would be more interesting and faster to just pick a random Coursera course or read the textbook (Computer Networking by Kurose and Ross).