CMPT 300 vs. CMPT 365

james_russel

Hey everyone, I was wondering what your opinions are on these two courses.

I
plan on doing co-op in the summer and I'm not sure which of these
courses to take(I can't take both). On the one hand, I really like the idea of image/audio
processing but I have heard that 300 is somewhat essential for co-op.
Also, Steven Pearce is teaching 300 and I have heard he is a bit of a
hack. What do you all think? For reference, my interests are more geared towards the practical side o computing.

ryan

I have not taken 365 yet, but I can talk about 300.

I didnt take 300 with pearce, but I have heard that the course is focused more on textbook readings and short answer questions than programming.

I took 300 out in surrey with arrvindh (who is also teaching it this semester in surrey) and really enjoyed it. The majority of the marks for the course came from assignments, and they were all programming assignments. Some of them were quite difficult, but by the end you felt like you had learned a lot. To get an idea of some of the stuff you can check out the course website from last spring.

 

http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ashriram/courses/2012/CS300/

I will say that a bunch of kids did drop the course early. I think they were intimidated by the first assignment. If you choose to take it though you will learn a lot about programming aspects of operating systems, and will have a solid foundational knowledge of linux by the end of the course (which may come in handy in the future)

*edit* I see the assignment links appear to be broken. As a general summary the assignments included writing a shell that supported a bunch of basic commands, parsing proc to return stats of cpu and memory usage,  playing with timing aspects of processes vs threads, implementing mutex locks, creating custom system calls, and implementing a scheduling policy. This was all done in C