Intro to Operating Systems is pretty tough

I am surprised at the number of people who have really struggled in GIOS. I found CP, CV, AI4R and AI harder. But, turns out all of those have lower drop rates than GIOS. Of course I'm not finished yet, taking GIOS right now, so knock on wood. In fairness - my background is probably a little bit more than other people in the program (see below).

The required reading papers are dense. But, every class in this program has required reading academic research papers. And, they're all dense.

In terms of the language itself, I find C to be inscrutable. I really don't grok pointers. On the other hand, I've found that persistence, GIOS Slack, Piazza, Googling and StackOverflow gets me to the right solution in terms of casting, *, &, malloc and free. Everything else is RTFM. Plus TAs are active on Slack, albeit fair amount of snark involved - I'll leave it to them to confirm or deny that statement (fsgeek is one of them).

I don't think the workload is six hours nightly. Maybe I'm bad at tracking time, but I'd say I'm in the 15 hours a week range for this class. Probably less. And that I've for sure spent more time on other OMSCS classes.

My Background: class #7. ~20 years experience, but not with OSes or C/C++. Read and worked through bits of K&R 10 years ago. Also read at least one other C++ book. Plus read and worked through a lot other books, such as Java Concurrency in Practice, Let's Build a Compiler, and Code Complete <- that's just a small sampling. Finally, this is MS #2 - first in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins. Undergrad was BA in Government from University of Maryland.

/r/OMSCS Thread