Type: Unrestricted Elective Module
Difficulty: Easy
Workload: Normal
Lecturer(s): Dr Zhou Lifeng
Lecturer(s): Dr Zhou Lifeng
Assessment: 5% tutorial attendance, 4x assignments worth 25%, 15% open book midterms, 55% closed book Finals
Another easy and interesting module offered by NUS Computing. A textbook isn't necessary for this module. I've always heard of the terms HTTPS, TLS, SSL, Sockets, IPv4, IPv6 but I never truly understood what they were. Having taken this module, I now understand what all of these mean and how they work. CS2105 an introduction module to computer networking and it gives an overview on what each layer of the OSI model is about without going too technical into each layer. Hence the 'easy' difficulty.
The 5% tutorial attendance is scorable, as long as you attend all tutorial sessions and generally ask more questions than your peers, then you'll be given the above-average mark. SoC students tend to be pretty quiet during tutorials, hence use this fact to your own advantage ;)
The 4 assignments consisted of you having to program sockets, either a server or a client, and also to develop a file transfer protocol over an unreliable network which may drop or corrupt your packets at random. These assignments were programmed using Java. I had 0 prior knowledge on sockets and I found the assignments to be pretty intimidating at first glance. It was because of this fact that I spent quite a lot of time on the assignments. However, there are many senior's examples online, and stackexchange is really your good friend in these assignments. Ultimately, I still managed to score full marks for all the assignments, so it is possible for you, even when you have no clue on what a socket is.
The open book midterms was pretty okay-ish, provided that you practiced all tutorial questions as well as the 3 sample past year papers which the lecturer provided as the midterms were just variants of the above subset of questions. Nothing fantastic. This also applies to the finals as well, it was pretty easy provided that you practiced and you know your concepts.
An extra kudos to Dr Zhou, for he was really really active in the forums. If you had any queries or doubts, just post it in the IVLE forums and Dr Zhou would almost always reply within the hour. It was as though he was 'camping' at the forums 24/7. I could tell that he was really really passionate about the understanding of his students.
* A Hint: The nature of this module is very theoretical, less of formula cramping, so it is really really really important that you understand everything in this module. Also, practise every single tutorial question and sample papers which he lecturer provides and it should suffice.
Another easy and interesting module offered by NUS Computing. A textbook isn't necessary for this module. I've always heard of the terms HTTPS, TLS, SSL, Sockets, IPv4, IPv6 but I never truly understood what they were. Having taken this module, I now understand what all of these mean and how they work. CS2105 an introduction module to computer networking and it gives an overview on what each layer of the OSI model is about without going too technical into each layer. Hence the 'easy' difficulty.
The 5% tutorial attendance is scorable, as long as you attend all tutorial sessions and generally ask more questions than your peers, then you'll be given the above-average mark. SoC students tend to be pretty quiet during tutorials, hence use this fact to your own advantage ;)
The 4 assignments consisted of you having to program sockets, either a server or a client, and also to develop a file transfer protocol over an unreliable network which may drop or corrupt your packets at random. These assignments were programmed using Java. I had 0 prior knowledge on sockets and I found the assignments to be pretty intimidating at first glance. It was because of this fact that I spent quite a lot of time on the assignments. However, there are many senior's examples online, and stackexchange is really your good friend in these assignments. Ultimately, I still managed to score full marks for all the assignments, so it is possible for you, even when you have no clue on what a socket is.
The open book midterms was pretty okay-ish, provided that you practiced all tutorial questions as well as the 3 sample past year papers which the lecturer provided as the midterms were just variants of the above subset of questions. Nothing fantastic. This also applies to the finals as well, it was pretty easy provided that you practiced and you know your concepts.
An extra kudos to Dr Zhou, for he was really really active in the forums. If you had any queries or doubts, just post it in the IVLE forums and Dr Zhou would almost always reply within the hour. It was as though he was 'camping' at the forums 24/7. I could tell that he was really really passionate about the understanding of his students.
* A Hint: The nature of this module is very theoretical, less of formula cramping, so it is really really really important that you understand everything in this module. Also, practise every single tutorial question and sample papers which he lecturer provides and it should suffice.
Expected Grade: A
Achieved Grade: A+
