COMP3331: Computer Networks and Applications

- 6x labs, worth 20% of your course mark all up; only your best 5 labs count
- 1x programming assignment, worth 20% of your course mark
- 1x midterm quiz, worth 20% of your course mark
- 1x final exam, worth 40% of your course mark

The only notable change to the above compared to normal exams was that the midterm and final were both conducted on Moodle. Each was also split into two parts, and you had a 15 minute window to start either after they went live on Moodle.

One of the following:
- COMP1927
- COMP2521
- MTRN3500

You should at least come into this course being comfortable with C, Python or Java. In practice, you will likely want to know one of at least Python or Java specifically, since doing labs and the assignment in C can be a bit of a pain (but an interesting challenge).

I personally found this course a bit underwhelming, and I wish I picked something else instead. This is partly due to it just not being my thing, but also some not so great things about the course when I took it. Wen is pretty meh as a lecturer, and the way he did things during the term I just found strange for some reason (I can think of no other words to describe it than those). Since the course runs all year though, you effectively have 3 lecturers to choose from depending on when you do it, so the choice is yours. I’ve heard different (better) things from people who did the course at other times, so take all of what I've said here and below with a grain of salt.

Although this course has a historical reputation for being easy, I wouldn’t be so hasty. There's a lot of content to deal with, and many places where you can lose marks very quickly. The midterm especially can be dangerous because although it’s all multiple choice, you lose 0.25 marks for each wrong answer on top of not getting any of the marks the question was worth. I also don’t know if it was just me, but the final exam was a combination of strange and hard; though I must confess, I didn’t study well for this one and ended up paying for it. On the other hand, the practical work is pretty easy marks. The labs are tedious but straightforward, and if you stick around for your lab classes, the tutor often goes through the lab giving some of the answers to get you started. The assignment is also fair; the main difficulty for me was interpreting the spec, and reconciling it with the clarifications given on the forum. It’s also released quite early to let people get a head start if they want.

While I found the content useful and definitely stuff worth knowing as a CSE student, one of the big things which always rubbed me the wrong way about it was how closely this course follows the textbook. I know people who say some courses are just “paying to be read a textbook for 10 weeks” are cliche at this point, but in this case I tend to agree. It’s always been my experience that lectures added something to the content which made a course worth taking over reading a textbook in your own time, and perhaps it was just the lecturer when I did it, but I didn’t really get any of that with this course. I feel like it would’ve been more worthwhile taking something else and just self-studying the material in my own time using the book.
To me then, it seems that it, like many other courses in CSE, is a gateway course; a course that allows you to do further courses in the area of networking, and other interesting courses like COMP9243 that have it as a prerequisite. If you have no current aspirations to do those though and you’re tossing up between it and something you think might be more interesting, what I’d suggest is take that other course and skim read the networks textbook a bit to get a feel for it. If you find what you’ve read interesting and you have the room to do the course or you change your mind about those future courses, then you’ve got some room to breathe still. If you're someone who's been told by others that you should do this course because having knowledge about how the internet works is useful (and they're right), I'm not entirely sure that doing this course is the best way to go about that. I don't want to discourage people from doing something they might enjoy, though, so regardless of your situation, I'd recommend reading the book and getting a feel for the course first.

- 2x 2 hour lectures
- 1x 2 hour lab, which runs instead as a tutorial before both your midterm and in the last week of term

3.5/5, which might come as a surprise to some who have done this course; read below

Yes, screen and voice recorded.

Assoc. Prof. Wen Hu

Lecture slides are the primary resource you’re given. A collection of non-compulsory “homework” questions are also progressively released during the term, which will be of particular interest since there are no past midterm or exam papers given for preparation.

2/5

This course makes heavy reference to “Computer Networking: A Top Down Approach” by Kurose and Ross (preferably the 7th edition). While it’s not compulsory to do so, it’s a very good idea to read this textbook as the lectures are often lacking all of the details that may pop up in your midterm or exam.

20T2

80 DN