To be honest, I didn't attend many of the class lectures. However, I did fine by doing all the assigned reading (which was a bit heavy but the textbook is interesting) and checking the slides to review the important topics. The lectures I did attend were interesting, but I had trouble paying attention because her voice is a bit quiet at times. However, you can definitely tell that Lixia knows what she's talking about and is a total expert in her field. Sometimes she tells funny stories, too!

The homework questions were sometimes a bit vague or hard to understand, but the TAs did a good job of clarifying on Piazza. The homework assignments also took varying amounts of time, but none of them were egregiously long. I also thought the projects were really useful for learning about networking concepts. We got to have a group (1-3) for the second project, which was time consuming to debug but overall fine.

For the midterm, you should be fine as long as you understand the slides well and figured out how to do the homework. I'm not sure about how difficult the final was because we were allowed to opt-out due to COVID-19.

Professor Zhang is one of the OGs of early networking. She helped found the IETF and coined the term "middlebox", so she definitely knows her stuff! She'll tell you lots of cool early internet stories if you go to office hours. That being said, she's not the best lecturer – she has a tendency to drone on through her slides. She offers some extra credit for participation, but lecture attendance drops pretty quickly and I saw people dozing off in class more than once. Homeworks and projects aren't too difficult, and the second project can be done in a team of 2-3. The material itself is pretty interesting and useful for industry jobs.

Projects in this class are awful.

Professor didn't wear a mic and couldn't be heard well or understood well for most of lecture time.

unclear lectures, lack of practice materials or past exams to study from, condescending professor

just do textbook problems and u will be ok

Contents were hard, lectures were not really organized and slides were a bit messy, but eventually a curve

His lectures are not the most inspiring as its it's just reading from slides and at 8 AM but he's a really smart guy and fairly nice. There are 2 projects in the class, project 1 is decently easy. Project 2 is a lot more in depth but he gives you almost 5 weeks to do it, so it's extremely doable within that time frame. The tests are not too hard and he curves pretty decently in the end. Take him if you have the chance

The lectures were at 8am, so it was a bit hard to pay attention. The class is recorded, but there were some times where the recording had issues. The class was interesting, and the projects were challenging.