CS 4630

This was a great class. Not super easy by any metric but I definitely learned a lot. I would recommend taking it with Reiss if you can because he really knows what he's talking about and he will explain things in lots of detail. He's also super active on Piazza, there was one time where I was running into an error an hour before an assignment was due and he was able to belp me out on Piazza. The lectures could get really hard to follow (a lot discussion of very fine details of assembly, which is just the reality of trying to make code do something its not supposed to do), but every once in a while Reiss would do an example question and walk us through the answer which really helped. The homeworks were also a ton of fun and generally not too difficult. Each one felt like a little puzzle to solve :)

Prof. Reiss is brilliant--I wouldn't be surprised if he knows the Intel 64 manual by heart. But more importantly, he's among the least condescending professors in the CS department. Like, I've asked some truly dense questions and never once has he made me feel stupid. His lectures are detailed (I compared notes with someone who took DADA with another prof and they're worlds apart), to the point where it's like drinking from a fire hose. But he periodically has polls and explains his thinking on the answers really thoroughly. Somehow my 30-second-attention-span brain never thinks to check the time until an hour into class, which seems like a compliment that he manages to keep things engaging. Anyway, super recommend him.