This was a great first course in the program and a very easy elective to knock out. The projects are very interesting but a bit easy. Add weekly surveys for students to give feedback on the course quality as a whole. the assignments were straightforward in python and the TA (Stacia) is an absolute star. It is generally assumed you have a working knowledge of computer networks, and there will be little hand holding here. The projects were simple and typically didnt require much effort assuming basic Python knowledge; Less than 2 hours each. I do have a Math/Stat background and found myself using Python for many years, all the concepts in this course are really new to me and sometimes I have to google a lot try to better understand them. 70 points (good projects, class content is too boring) Project 2 and 3 which were in Python took the longest but I enjoyed the most. The instructors were great, the TAs were great. I took an introduction to Python course on coursera as preparation. TAs were supportive, but did not really encourage creativity. This course is geared towards providing a skillset for software engineers who may work in the networking domain. Must be treated 24 hours a day. Use them. Background: My bachelors was in electrical engineering, and I have ~1 year of work experience. English is not my first language, but some of the mistakes are very noticeable and that is definitely not the quality I expected from Georgia Tech. Projects and environment were well prepared and presented. Tests are not worth much so its really just doing well in the labs and decent enough on exams. Only one assignment out of eight had a significant issue that didnt effect grades for anyone. Im not a huge fan of networks in general, but I still had no trouble getting through this course content. People basically dont read and ask all kinds of questions that are clearly explained in the project requirement. Students are helping each other as much as possible, but it would be nice to get official confirmation for questions that relate to policy/procedures. They were not clear and it may not be the TAs fault probably the course just had management issues so nobody knew what was going on. Ended up with an A and didnt do any extra credit. The only negative is that a few of the projects had issues. Graphs and other resources are mostly copied directly from Kurose and other books (introducing some errors here and there). This was my first OMSCS class, so I went in not knowing what to expect. The ONE open-ended part of the class was to be weekly discussions on Piazza with the prof. Youre good to take the quiz after reading the lecture material. The tests were straight forward, not tricky wording like other courses do. Course assignments had us replicate and analyze research experiments (e. g. TCP Fast Open, Buffer Bloat, SDN, etc). All instructions are given in the project write up, you just need to run commands in mininet, analyze the results, and write a report. I came to appreciate the fact that quizzes they essentially forced you to study for the exams throughout the semester. My 6th course into the OMSCS. Straightforward. For instance, FANG companies have hundreds of hybrid engineers who have a mixture of networking and software skillsets to support their global infrastructures. Overall, I liked the class and I learned a lot, but it has flaws which I hope are resolved in the coming semesters. Lots of research papers to read, so be aware if you are a slow reader like I am. Relatively easy projects that took me a single workday each at max. I think the instructors were probably doing the best they could with the atrocious class they were given. You will definitely be spending hours on each homework and even more studying the material. Overall, projects are interesting, but should be improved in depth. The problem in this course is the course material. Projects (70%): I have a solid grasp of Python, and I thought the projects were pretty easy. This is one of the first courses I took in OMS. The lectures were fabulous and the projects did a great job teaching me Mininet and helping me get my Python skills up to par. This was by far the most interesting part of the course for me and it really hammered home all of the layers beneath Pyretic that we just kind of gloss over in the Georgia Tech course. The material could still use a little more proofreading (I believe its still in development) but I found the subject matter to be very interesting. Some of the projects were newly designed and had bugs, but those were worked out and time extensions were given where necessary. The course did change in its organisation this semester significantly but the contents did not change at all. James Lohse the Head TA was so prompt and had a quick turnaround that getting info on projects was never a problem. Projects are python based Very good videos, projects are okay, and tests are good too. She publicly castigated / punished students she apparently considered to be overly creative / curious, or insufficiently enamored of her top-down approach, on a number of occasions (as she seems to conflate them with the lazy or unmotivated as being problem students.) These latter projects really required no coding youd just follow the instructions provided and write up the results. The Quizzes: For each lecture, there is an accompanying quiz that must be done by the end of the week. Projects were very interesting and relevant. In summer semester there are 4 projects in total: spanning tree, distance vector, SDN firewall and BGP measurements, plus one warmup (no credit) and one extra credit (3% of total). The TAs made video walkthroughs and I just followed those and basically completed the project by the time I finished the video. Having experience with Python, I found the projects very easy. I would STRONGLY recommend getting Project 2 and 3 to pass ALL TESTS. However, the error messages provided by OpenFlow suck and can be misleading, and you might take a while to figure out your bugs due to this. I found the reading material (papers and articles) to be quite helpful in my learning. The professor for the summer didnt even show up once. I had zero networking experience or knowledge prior to this course, but am walking out of it thinking that I could at least hold a semi-intelligent conversation with a networking/cloud engineer now. I took this course mainly because my undergrad Networking professor was more interested in telling stories about being a former cop than actually teaching, and so I wanted to strengthen my knowledge in this area. The tests are usually MCQs and are taken straight from the text of some papers. The projects have been beefed up, there are three tests, and something like 10 to 15 dense papers you have to read. My classmates who came up with the test suites, you guys are amazing! It was my 7th. Overall this was a class with interesting content, but I dont think Id recommend it (especially not as a first course). This class was interesting and useful. Project documents are very organized. The TAs were absolutely incredible, particularly Erick. You will be learning old stuff, but still very relevant given the underpinnings of TCP/IP havent changed that much in 30 years. Lectures: These are good, but they are not very consistent in the amount of detail covered. Its optional, but I learned a lot more from it than the lectures, so if you dont have a networking background I highly recommend it. The BGP project took some time to wrap my head around it. My goal was to have a GUI Client and Server application where on the server side you would change the Protocol and Port For Fall, we had an extra assignment BGP Hijacking which was to simulate a hijacking scenario and it was relatively easy compared to SDN and BGPM. Adds up! Projects 2 and 3 were a bit tricky because they were easy to mess up on, but once you get past them the rest of the class is smooth sailing. Probably a good class to pair with a hard class. Overall, this was a good class. Project-driven learning. My biggest issue with the course is that the instructor was completely absent. The median grade on all assignments was 100%. Just to get B But then closed-book tests are more helpful retaining the concepts. The instructor that had created the course had just left GATech and new instructor was yet to engage completely. In fact, one question was copied word-for-word - the answer from that site and the accepted answer in the class were different. Theres the odd question or 2 that feel tricky and difficult, but for the most part the answers correspond directly to the notes provided. The extra credit was a simpler version of BGP Measurements, it was a lot of fun to work with the same environment/setup after getting to know it a little bit and was more rewarding because I already had a clue of the direction to go in. I found that TAs were helpful in gaining understanding of the lecture material. Bottom line - to answer those questions you need to really understand the subject. As someone who does not have a CS background, I still say this class was incredibly easy. The project SDN Firewall requires you to implement several firewall rules using POX. I took this class first because I dont have a lot of computer science courses under my belt, this is a foundational course I think any good software developer should take, the reviews indicated this is a relatively low workload course (compared to, e.g., Machine Learning and the like), and I am good with Python (and this class uses Python). I do not understand how some students flew through the weekly lectures, as I found them to be fairly dense. Both basic and research topics in networking are covered. 7 projects, of which 4 are python based, need little coding (maximum I coded was maybe 3-4 pages in total for the course but you must understand python and programming to know what you are doing). Frequently, the wording on quizzes was so ambiguous that Piazza was flooded with questions and office hours were spent asking the instructor to clarify the same question over and over again. RPs are dry and boring. It was challenging to both prepare for and thoroughly cover the required material in just the 2 tests. Be prepared to be frustrated while testing your code you will not get it right easily. Remember to navigate into the folder with the cd clone_boma command. She chimed in through the TAs to remediate some problems with due dates at the beginning of the semester, and that was it. Obscure! The python programming itself was not difficult, but you did have to spend time understanding the concepts and the other code with which you were interfacing. As other reviewers noted, not all the lectures have videos, and when they did, it seemed like the professor was just reading straight off a piece of paper. They offer modern and thorough information on the subject, but are among the dullest of the 9 courses Ive taken. Basic python coding is needed. Great first course or easier course to pair with a harder one. I learned a fair bit about how the internet worked, and the introduction to software defined networking was fun to play around in. If they ask you to give the top 5 ASes by some metric, and you find there are 10, not 5, then fine, give them the top 10. There are 2 assignments that took > 10 hrs to complete. The last project (BGP Metrics) was the only one that was not much fun. The faculty of Georgia Tech provided no communication about this courses professor or his absence. This ambiguity was in part due to the ambiguous descriptions in the project documentation, but even more so because the project TAs were virtually non-existent. No. Assignments dont strengthen your theory or practice - rather, Honestly, this class is not that hard but its so hard to stay engaged. I wish you all the best. I saw that one of our folks decided to give up this hw. Tests your algorithms, follow the walkthrough. This class is very poorly designed and run. Not engaging at all. The intention is to help you, but it honestly had the opposite effect for me (and some others as well admittedly.) Even better, how about having feedback for the weekly lecture, letting students list the pros and cons of how the material is presented, and what they would do to improve it? All the material you need for the assignments and exams is covered in the class. I like the lectures. The programming assignments were downright awful. Even if you dont know python you will be able to figure out the assignments - the coding required is very basic. The writing projects are easy 100s. Each project should take about 5-15 hours for the average student. Not only that, they were released late too many times (at least one week as late as Wednesday). Most of the assignments I believe can be completed with almost no networking knowledge. The instructions and the expectations were very clear for the assignments (exception BGPM). (This was a common response referring to tests in T-Square). 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