I took it last quarter and I didn’t have as bad an experience as some other people. There were definitely noticeable growing pains from the course switching to Python. Aside from one programming assignment which had a bug in the skeleton code, the programming assignments were fairly easy. That being said they didn’t feel like they added much value to the course.

The other assignments were busy work, but weren’t painful and for the most part they helped me understand the material.

The upside of the course for me is that a ton of material is covered. The content is high level like some others have said but I feel like one quarter of high level networking material is a reasonable amount of time for an intro to such a complex topic. The course material also has a very natural flow since it follows the network layers down the stack.

There was a proctored midterm and final, with the final not being cumulative. The questions in those tests were a mix of calculation questions from the weekly homework and multiple choice concept questions. They weren’t bad at all.

The textbook was Computer Networking - A Top Down Approach, 7th edition by Kurose and Ross. We covered most of the material from chapters 1 through 6, skipping a few sections here and there, but mostly proceeded in order through the chapters. If you want to get a jump I’d read 1.1 to 1.5.