Agree. I'm about to graduate from CMU, and their OS class was an extremely rewarding experience. I've heard similar things about their compilers class.
The required intro classes are also pretty rigorous, although I didn't take them personally. I'd bet that any CMU CS (note that engineering is a very separate program at CMU) grad would at least somewhat know how to program, and will have programmed in assembly and ML, along with the usual Java and C. Obviously you have to check whether they got C's in the big rigorous classes or not, but it's basically a good bar. It would be impossible to graduate and then fail FizzBuzz, for example, which to my understanding is not true of most CS programs.
The one main complaint I had with it was that the required freshman theory course (251), which is supposed to be this great legendary weed-out thing, was just a hodgepodge of badly specified discrete math, and still is, to my knowledge. It was hard, but in my opinion not in a good way. Maybe it works as a weed-out but not as an educational tool. The later required algorithms course, 451, was much better.
Comments
Agree. I'm about to graduate from CMU, and their OS class was an extremely rewarding experience. I've heard similar things about their compilers class.
The required intro classes are also pretty rigorous, although I didn't take them personally. I'd bet that any CMU CS (note that engineering is a very separate program at CMU) grad would at least somewhat know how to program, and will have programmed in assembly and ML, along with the usual Java and C. Obviously you have to check whether they got C's in the big rigorous classes or not, but it's basically a good bar. It would be impossible to graduate and then fail FizzBuzz, for example, which to my understanding is not true of most CS programs.
The one main complaint I had with it was that the required freshman theory course (251), which is supposed to be this great legendary weed-out thing, was just a hodgepodge of badly specified discrete math, and still is, to my knowledge. It was hard, but in my opinion not in a good way. Maybe it works as a weed-out but not as an educational tool. The later required algorithms course, 451, was much better.