The reviews here are spot on in my experience. I'm 7 courses in for OMSCS. I learned the most in this course out of any so far. This is also the most time-consuming and difficult course I've ever taken. It's second only to CSE-6220 HPC for my favorite course overall.

I threw myself into the deep end with this course, having almost no background knowledge on the subject matter, and struggled to get a C. That's on me, but I'm glad I did it. The juice is worth the squeeze. Some topics require a period of intense study to make any meaningful progress on, and I think this is one of them, at least for me. Things began to really click with Lab 5 for me. The course does a great job of using earlier labs as stepping stones to the next topics.

It always bothered me that I didn't have an understanding of how ELF binaries actually worked. Now I have (some) understanding of that. This course really helped me solidify my understanding of some of the higher-level concepts from HPCA and GIOS.

I think if this topic interests you, your life situation is compatible with the workload, you know what you're getting yourself into, and you can live with a C or a W, you should definitely register. This is grad school, it's supposed to be hard, right?

Three tips that would've made things easier for me:

1. use a Docker devcontainer instead of a VirtualBox VM from day 1 for all tasks where GUI tools are not necessary.
2. rack up points early on. the concepts start to make more sense later on, but the challenges don't get any easier.
3. take Malware Analysis first