This post is part of an ongoing series recapping my experience in Oregon State University’s eCampus (online) post-baccalaureate Computer Science degree program. You can learn more about the program here.
Six-word summary: Four final projects in a row
CS344 is your chance to work on four large, back-to-back projects that cover a breadth of topics. They feel a bit contrived (ie: more like schoolwork than real-world problems) at times and their application to real problems might be hard to see at first, but there’s no denying it: doing four big projects in a row will level up your skills a whole bunch.
CS344 Review
This course picks up where other C courses left off and introduces some new and exciting features, such as bash scripting and mutual exclusion locks.
The projects are utterly massive – any one of them could’ve been CS162’s notoriously huge final project – and the course comes off as feeling more like an advanced C course than an operating systems course because of it. You do a lot of project setup and boilerplate in this class (but you do touch on a long list of OS topics as well). Sometimes the new thing (whatever the actual point of the assignment was) only takes minutes to add, like a little cherry on top of a 5-tier wedding cake of a C project.
Class structure
- 10 weeks
- 4 programming projects with about 2 weeks each
- Bash and C programming language
- No midterm, open-book (but timed) final
- Due dates are kinda all over the place, best to triple-check them (they don’t follow a pattern)
Grading script FTW
CS344’s best feature is the clarity of its expectations. Unlike many of the courses that came before it in this program, this one is VERY CLEAR about what’s expected and how you’ll be graded on it. They hand you a grading script that runs your program code and spits out a list of results (pass/fail) or something for you to interpret. When it all passes, so do you. It’s that simple.
Overall, this class is fair and straightforward. It’s one of those classes you just gotta be disciplined and hardworking in, and it’ll reward you by introducing you (in a fairly friendly way) to topics such as sockets, locking threads, writing bash script, making your own shell, and more. I’m not sure I would have pushed myself through some of this stuff on my own – the project where we wrote our own shell was definitely intimidating at first – but I’m glad the program included this class and these opportunities. I think I learned a lot in CS344!
Tips for CS344
You don’t have to code on the school server. The class will tell you up and down and over and over to code in VIM on the school server. You don’t have to. I did the whole class on my MacBook in SublimeText and I transferred the files to the school server for testing using FileZilla. It’s just bash and C code, there’s no reason to isolate it the way the class tells you to.
I think this whole “only work on the school server” stuff is bad advice. The programs in this class are large enough to justify a text editor and working locally makes it easy to use version control (which you should absolutely be using – at least one person in my class lost their work by compiling over their .c files on accident :( ).
I kinda wish I’d taken it alone or with a less time-consuming class. I paired it with CS340 (Databases) and the two classes just took turns being hellishly time-consuming. It’s like right on the fence of being a “better off alone” class. By itself it might’ve felt light, but paired with anything I was constantly strapped for time. YMMV.