How hard is a Computer Organization course?

[cwarrior]

How hard would you say a Computer Organization course with the following description is

This course introduces the students to the principles and fundamentals of digital system design. Topics covered include: Binary numbers, base conversions, signed numbers, Boolean algebra, logic gates, K-map method, combinational circuits, decoders/encoders, multiplexers, sequential circuits, flip-flops, state diagram, registers, counters and addressing techniques.

is this the kind of course that you can't miss lectures or else you will be lost or is this the kinda course that you can pick up by studying the book and doing homework and labs?

[DemonWasp]

Pretty simple overall, but lots of fiddly details. That course sounds like CS251 at UW, which I found to be pretty simple and easy...but then I attended every class.

The way it was run at UW, you could probably get away with missing a fair portion of the lectures in favour of studying at another time, but it's certainly not recommended.

Consider this: at $4500 / term, you're paying roughly $800 / class, or about $27 per hour of lecture (assuming you have 3 hours per week, 10 weeks). Every time you skip a class, you're throwing away $27 or $40 or whatever.

[Tony]

It sounds like a subset of UW's CS251 (251 ultimately leads up to designing, debugging, and modifying a pipelined CPU architecture). It's a fun and easy course.

You can probably get away with missing a few lectures, but if the course notes have just the problems setup, and the prof shows the process and the solution of wiring things together... you might not have the right material to study from.

Although if your course doesn't actually get into CPU architecture, then maybe it doesn't matter.

[jbking]

It reminds of CS 351 which had a couple of labs but was rather easy to me as I recall. Of course I did have a few years of some of those topics in high school where we had the bread board and learned about AND, OR, NOT, XOR, NAND, and NOR gates. Some of the hardware aspects aren't that difficult but I would suggest seeing if you can find out what format are the exams and how is your grade calculated. Here are a few different ways that could be and why it is important:

1) Labs - Do exercises that have to be done during the lab count as part of the grade?
2) Exam format - If they are multiple choice then previous exams may be more useful than the lecture notes or textbook possibly.

Lastly, there is the question of how do you learn: Reading, verbally, pictures, or something else? That also plays a role here that shouldn't be forgotten.

[dcvg]

I'm taking CS251 right now & I would not reccomend skipping lectures. This is only the first week and I was 10 mins late to the class and I was completely lost to what was going on rest of the lecture. Thankfully the prof had another section later in the day which I sat in on.

[Vermette]

Tony @ September 17th 2009, 11:23 wrote:

It sounds like a subset of UW's CS251 (251 ultimately leads up to designing, debugging, and modifying a pipelined CPU architecture). It's a fun and easy course.

You can probably get away with missing a few lectures, but if the course notes have just the problems setup, and the prof shows the process and the solution of wiring things together... you might not have the right material to study from.

Although if your course doesn't actually get into CPU architecture, then maybe it doesn't matter.

Sounds similar to 60-265 here at Windsor that I took in 2005. We spent the last two weeks building our CPUs and main memory in MAX+PLUSII and writing a baby compiler to convert a baby assembly language into our op codes. Starting the simulation and seeing our program 'run' was one of the most satisfiying moments of that year.

[cwarrior]

Does this course involve a lot of math?

[apomb]

quite possibly binary math, but nothing more than conversions between hex, octal and binary.

[jbking]

I'd disagree a little with apomb as the logic gates and Boolean Algebra is also Mathematical, at least to my mind. Thinking of AND gates and OR gates as Mathematical operators can be useful to some extent.

I'd just be prepared for a lot of numbers in such a course, but that's me.

[apomb]

ah yes, boolean, I knew that there was something else mathematical. Thanks for catching that jbking.

[Tony]

UW's CS251 has a tiny isolated section on floating-point arithmetic.

And there was this one part about calculating average performance with certain rates of cache hit/miss on multiple levels.