cs145 Prereq self check

cs145 has some soft pre-reqs including cs161 and cs111.

Pre-reqs: You should have some familiarity with OS, algorithms and complexity in RAM. We focus on extending these to non-RAM when data does not fit. Also, you should be able to read python code.

Audience: cs145 is about how to use and BUILD data systems. cs145 is not a SQL only class. We spend 66% of our time on how data systems are built. If you're looking for a "how to use a DB" or SQL ONLY class, you may find a better match with the data science course MSE sometimes offers.

Why these pre-reqs? We want to help you figure out when is the right time for you to take the class. Students (in previous years) who didn't have this background, tended to get lost. E.g., we assume you know how SortMerge works in RAM, what is complexity of Sorting n values in RAM, and the idea of paging data between RAM and disk. cs145's goal is focused on 100-1000x bigger data problems. (Sample refresher material: RAM (1st 2 sections), Filesystems and OS, Merge-sort in RAM, Complexity)

Here's some material from Week 3. Do you feel comfortable with OS/paging to follow along? Can you read the sample python code?

Here's some material from Week 3. Do you feel comfortable with sorting/hashing in RAM to follow along before we get to our class material -- how to extend to 100x-1000x bigger data?

Here's some material from Week 3. Do you feel comfortable with the 1st 5 mins of algorithm complexity? The next 7 mins is sample material from cs145, where we'll focus on how to extend to IO complexity for our problems.