Pre-requisite.
A course on
operating systems is the sole pre-prerequisite for the introductory course.
This is considered essential for two reasons:
First, in many current computer systems there is a close relationship
between networking/communications
and the host operating system. A prior course in the latter
helps students to appreciate this relationship.
Second, our undergraduate operating systems course
includes a
moderately complex C-based programming project. For many students this is their
first significant C programming experience.
Such experience is important to insure that students have an adequate level of
programming sophistication to complete the assigned
project in the networks course.
It is probably the case that the second reason, programming
experience/sophistication, is the more important of the two
reasons for requiring the operating systems pre-requisite.
Because the course is intended for
computer science and computer engineering students, it is impractical
to include a mathematics pre-requisite as this would significantly limit
the potential clientele.
A course on modeling/simulation/probability would be very helpful.
There is also no electrical engineering pre-requisite
because this would rule out a large number of software-oriented computer
science students.
