15-441 Assignments

There will be two programming projects and four written homework assignments.

Topic Assigned Due Other Info Solutions
Project 1 09/05 10/12 Lead TA: George Nychis. Note checkpoint due dates!
FAQ
Checkpoint 1 Checkpoint 2 Checkpoint 3 Checkpoint 4
IRC Binaries
UDP Example
Homework 1 9/12 9/21 Lead TA: George Nychis Solutions
Homework 2
Snapshot for Q3
9/28 10/05 Lead TA: Dan Wendlandt Solutions
Homework 2 Lab 10/11 10/24 Lead TA: Dan Wendlandt Solutions
Project 2 10/26 12/05 Lead TA: Dan Wendlandt
Homework 3
Snapshot for Section 4
Skeleton code for Section 4
11/2 11/9 Lead TA: Vyas Sekar Solutions
Homework 4
11/21 12/7 Lead TA: Vyas Sekar Solutions

All homework is to be done individually. The programming projects will be done in groups of two students.

The projects are done in groups for two reasons. The first is the size of the class. The second and more important reason is that this is an opportunity to experience the joys and frustrations of working with others. It's a skill you only get better at with practice.

Since 15-441 fulfills the project-class requirement of the CS degree, you will be expected to learn and practice good software engineering, as well as demonstrate mastery of the networking concepts. Both partners in a project group will need to fully understand the project and your solution in order to do well on those exam questions relating to the projects. For example, a typical question might be: "When you implemented X, you came across a particular situation Y that required some care. Explain why this simple solution Z doesn't work and describe how you solved it." We'll pick questions such that it will take some effort to figure out Y. If you didn't take the time to work the problem yourself and just relied on your partner, you won't have enough time during the test to figure it out. Be careful, the insights you'll need will come only from actually solving the problem as opposed to just seeing the solution.

By their nature, the assignments aren't going to be completely comprehensive of everything you'll encounter in the real world or in class. To assist you, we've compiled a list of suggested study problems that you may want to do in addition to the normal homework. They're not graded, but they'd make great topics to discuss with the course staff during office hours.

Notes on the 15-441 Programming Projects

A key objective of 15-441 is to provide a significant experience with system programming, where you must write programs that are robust and that must integrate with a large, installed software base. Oftentimes, these programs are the ones that other people will build upon or use as tools. Systems programming is very different from the application program development you have done in earlier courses:

We'll go into more detail about each of these points during the recitation sections. But keep in mind: The programming assignments in 15-441 are larger and more open-ended than in other courses. Doing a good job on the project requires more than just producing code that runs: it should have a good overall organization, be well implemented and documented, and be thoroughly tested.


Last updated: Thu Dec 14 20:01:19 EST 2006 [validate xhtml]