Homework:

The homework consisted of weekly activities and programming assignments.

The weekly activities are similar to CS240 or CS300's Canvas quizzes. There are usually 5-7 problems that test your knowledge on the previous week and this current week's material. The questions are not too difficult. However, tracing assembly code, analyzing C syntax, or debugging problems are more involved.

The programming assignments are not difficult either. They are similar to assignments in entry-level programming courses. Since CS 354 introduces students to low-level programming, I believe this is a good way to smoothen the learning curve of C programming & x86-64 assembly language programming. In my semester, we had 6 programming assignments:

• P1: Introduction to C - parsing through 100+ text data

• P2: Arrays - 1D & 2D arrays with pointers

• P3: Linked lists - structs

• P4: Memory Allocator - building a memory allocator that mimics the effect of malloc and free

• P5: Introduction to x86-64 assembly language - implement toUpper() with assembly language

• P6: Cache memory - stimulating a read-only L1 cache

Exams:

The exams were conducted in-person. The problems were similar to those from CS200 & CS300. We were expected to know C & x86-64 syntax, be able to trace through code, and identify the better solution to a problem.

The midterm had a weight of 15%, and the final exam had a weight of 20%. The final exam is cumulative. However, Professor Mike gave us a list of topics that could be on the final exam, which greatly narrowed down what to review. Moreover, we were given a reference sheet of the common registers to assist us in parsing assembly code.

Neither of the exams were overly difficult. There are some questions that are tricky. However, the exams were mainly focused on the topics that were covered right before the exam. For the midterm, the main topic was the memory allocator and how malloc/free works in the heap. For the final exam, the main topic was assembly code & cache memories.