Operating Systems (CS 347)

Operating systems

The first real course on systems, CS 347 is a course that introduces several new and fundamental concepts regarding Operating Systems(Windows,Unix,Macintosh etc). The course outlines the various functionalities of an operating system and focuses on the various methods it uses to achieve these. A good understanding of these issues and functionalities is heavily recommended for any computer science student, especially the ones who go into systems related work in the future.

The course does introduce a LOT of new concepts and students are advised to continuously keep in touch with the syllabus, else the syllabus seems to grow exponentially. A good help in this regard has been the conducting of frequent quizzes by the Professor which does keep a check on the student. The common material available for the course are the slides and two books prescribed by the professor which cater to the course requirements more than sufficiently.

The Lab -

The corresponding lab for the course will mostly run in parallel with the lectures. Hence it is advisable to be in touch with the latest happenings in the lectures. The assignments would involve programming in C. Some of the assignments have to be finished in the lab hours itself. Hence it is advisable to plan assignments properly before starting with programming. Good structured programming is a must, as the assignments tend to grow very large and also, some assignments may be reused in future assignments. Debugging large pieces of code can get very painful! Debuggers like gdb can turn out to be very useful. Also, never procastinate these assignments; you never know how much time it will take to complete!

(Post Credits Naman Agarwal,Pritish Kamath)