[PLUG-TALK] What they teach in CS classes

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Wed Dec 7 05:01:28 UTC 2005


On Tue, 6 Dec 2005, Andrew Becherer wrote:

> 	I think I can illuminate this situation. I am in this class. We both
> attend the Computing and Software Systems program at the University of
> Washington, Tacoma. The program is focused on software development and
> includes all the courses you would expect such as Discrete Mathematics,
> Data Structures, Algorithms, Software Development Methodology, etc. A
> description of the curriculum can be found at http://tinyurl.com/c8klo
> (tacoma.washington.edu).

Andrew,

   Thank you _very_ much for clarifying the situation and educating us so
well.

   I've never known whether to admire or pity students and faculty at
institutions using tri-mester or quarters. The college and universities I
attended, and where I taught, were all on the semester system and all too
often, even 15 weeks was simply insufficient to teach (or learn) more than a
superficial smattering of a subject. Similarly, some large universities
(e.g., the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign) had a 20-hour Biology,
Zoology, Ecology, Botany, Chemistry, etc. major, and the lab courses were 5
credits. This means one could leave with a B.S. degree and four courses
beyond the introductory one. I was fortunate: the college where I finished my
undergraduate degree had 48-hour science majors, beyond the introductory
courses.

>	The course we are discussing here is TCSS 422: Operating Systems. The
> assignment in question can be found at http://tinyurl.com/cqsf4
> (faculty.washington.edu). We are using Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems
> text. During class and on our midterm we have dealt with all of the things
> one would expect out of an operating systems course (Processes & Threads,
> Scheduling, Deadlocks, Starvation, Race Conditions, Memory Management, IO,
> File Systems, etc). Because of the limited time (a one quarter course) the
> list of topics covered may not be as extensive as one would like to see nor
> the subjects covered in the depth one would prefer.

   It seems like your curriculum is both broad and deep, but you may be
limited both by time constraints and the expertise and abilities of the
instructors. That's frustrating, isn't it?

> I for one have been utilizing Tanenbaum's Design and Implementation of
> Operating Systems along with Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development 2nd
> Edition in order to fill out my knowledge. Also I am fortunate to have an
> associate who is a really sharp Software Engineer at Intel DuPont with whom
> I can discuss both operating systems and the shortcomings of Computer
> Science programs.

   In 1987 a Civil Engineer friend at the Water Management District and I each
bought a copy of Tannenbaum's OS book, and we downloaded a stack of 5.25"
floppy disks' worth of Minix. We installed it on our PCs at home and worked
together to learn what was going on. Totally irrelevant to our work, but we
had fun doing it.

Rich

-- 
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |   Author of "Quantifying Environmental
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)   |  Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic"
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>     Voice: 503-667-4517         Fax: 503-667-8863



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