My Review of (INFO 3110) Linux/Unix Operating Systems

           Grade: A
      Difficulty: 1/10
          Rating: 5/10
 Time commitment: 6 hours/week
------------------------------

This course focuses on OS fundamentals: process/thread abstractions, concurrency and synchronization mechanisms, deadlock management strategies, processor allocation, memory management, I/O device, file management, and system virtualization. It also presents techniques for operating system design, implementation, and evaluation. The homework assignments offer lots of hands-on exercise.

Assignments

Weekly coding/quiz assignments (25%): All open-book, open-internet, untimed, multiple choice, take-home format. Some questions are about concepts, while other questions perform some task on the university unix server and "choose the output value from the following choices." - all auto graded.
Exams: One midterm (35%) and one final (40%). Open book, take-home, multiple choice format. There is essentially no difference between weekly quizzes and exams. Overall, easy.

Thoughts

It was a bit of hassle to go through the process of setting up specific configuration of temporary Unix account on the university server, which involved mandatory VPN & MFA (multi-factor authentication) setup.

Overall this course is relatively light workload. They could probably add more complex hands-on exercise.

The course instructor (Fred Vegliante) is a reasonable person and a very geeky unix enthusiast.