I'm also a TA for this class at my university, and I think it is excellent. In fact, I think many of our grad students would benefit from taking it - the course emphasizes understanding the whole system stack in ways that other courses (such as a classic OS course) do not.
The bomb and buffer overflow labs are probably the most interesting to the HN community, but the shell project is what I consider the most important project in the course. (We have five projects: bomb, buffer overflow, shell, memory allocator, web server.) Our shell assignment is quite a bit different from the original in that we parse the command line for them (putting the commands and pipelines into appropriate data structures), but they have to do everything else, including pipes and I/O redirection.
Email me if anyone is interested in learning more about how we do our course.
The bomb and buffer overflow labs are probably the most interesting to the HN community, but the shell project is what I consider the most important project in the course. (We have five projects: bomb, buffer overflow, shell, memory allocator, web server.) Our shell assignment is quite a bit different from the original in that we parse the command line for them (putting the commands and pipelines into appropriate data structures), but they have to do everything else, including pipes and I/O redirection.
Email me if anyone is interested in learning more about how we do our course.