CS 4630

I would definitely try to take this class with Reiss of Bloomfield if you can. Prof Davidson is a very nice guy and is very smart but is definitely the worst at lecturing of all the CS profs I've had so far. He talks really slow, tells a lot of stories about his life that don't augment the lesson, and doesn't have very helpful slides. Again; nice guy, but not that great at lecturing. I think I would have liked this class if office hours were more available. Guy, our TA, didn't know how to do some of the assignments and was very slow at grading.
Prof. Davidson also showed music videos at the beginning of class every class which was odd since it didn't have anything to do with cs. Most were just random musics videos, one had some young women making out with each other in it. Not sure why we were watching that.

Class is definitely not hard, but the material is pretty dry and boring. Prof. Davidson is a pretty dry lecturer and most of the time he goes on random tangents. Tests are not too hard, just a lot of memorization for the most part. HW's are pretty vague since we never did anything like the hw during lecture.

Professor Davidson is an interesting guy. He has a lot of stories to tell about the subject at hand, and he's pretty knowledgeable about the subject.

That being said, thats basically what his lectures are. You spend some time going over the material, but a portion of the class is spent with Davidson telling a story about some virus or security flaw.

The material in class covers a decent number of topics, but they are usually all older viruses and/or types of buffer overflow attacks. I wish there was more material on newer viruses.

The class itself isn't too difficult. There are weekly homeworks that take a few hours to complete. Get really familiar with gdb, as it will definitely help you complete the homework faster. There are three in class tests, the lowest of which is dropped, and then there is a take home final exam.

The class not being too difficult has it drawbacks though. I got a 90+ in the class, and still received a B due to a lot of people getting 90+, so be sure to do well on the tests.

I probably wouldn't recommend this class, unless you're really interesting in the subject matter, or want a fairly lightweight CS elective.

This is a really great course here. You learn a lot, both in the homework and in lecture. Davidson is a really great guy even if he does go on tangents often, and the course is well graded.

Definitely go to office hours for homework help, the TA's are great at helping. It's not too hard of a class and is really fun to do

The homework assignments were very helpful in learning real applications of the material. Professor Davidson's lectures are very dry and he does not do a good job making them engaging.

Professor Davidson did a terrible job laying out the structure of the course. We were told that the final exam would be replaced with a final project. However, on our second to last class, he informed us that we would have a final assignment in addition to a cumulative final exam, all of which were due before our scheduled final exam time (and all by the third day of exams). This is laziness on the part of Professor Davidson and is unacceptable. Finals are an extremely busy time for students and we deserve to know structural information like this about the class long before the last week of classes.

He is also overwhelmingly sexist. During the last week of classes he forced us to watch a movie that made a point to say that engineering, and computer science in particular, is for men and not a place for women. As a female computer science major I found this extremely offensive.

The material itself was very interesting, and Professor Davidson is extremely intelligent, but he did a terrible job teaching this class. Even with all of this, the class is still worthwhile and the assignments are interesting. Just don't get your hopes up for a good teacher.

There are three tests throughout the semester and you get to drop your lowest score. They get harder throughout the semester so definitely try to plan on dropping the third if possible. For the most part, the early tests are flat out regurgitation of memorized terms.

This class sounds so awesome from the outside, but in reality if you don't realllyyyy enjoy assembly, hex, and digging through stuff like that it's not a whole lot of fun. Most of the homeworks are frustrating rather than thought-provoking.

Davidson lectures right off of the slides, so the attention level in class is pretty low. Also, his tests are directly from the slides, so study hard the night before and memorize a ton and you'll be okay.

He's also very, very evasive about the final exam which changed drastically during the last week of class. This ended up screwing over some people as he moved the exam forward with a week of warning. Frustrating, considering he could have told us he was considering this long before the last week of class.

There are probably better electives out there unless you think you want to pursue a job in computer security.

Much of this class is very low-level as you'll be learning about things such as buffer overflows and actually doing them. If you're not used to working with bytes and assembly then the homeworks are generally challenging but manageable and you learn a lot. While it's not quite as fun as the class name would suggest, I did feel like it was worthwhile. Lectures are taught from slides and can be a bit boring.