Sample Exam at the Faculty of Computer Science at TU Dresden

Everyone is accustomed to thinking that by studying computer science at an institute, we master either basic concepts or outdated technologies. Thanks to the training of TU Dresden, I realized that there are universities where they teach relevant and practically applicable technologies at a sufficiently high level. Today I passed the exam in the discipline "Internet and web applications." Studying the texts of lectures and practical classes in this discipline, I repeatedly turned to Wikipedia and Habra to clarify certain nuances. As a result, I figured out WebSockets, found out about Akamai, and read in detail about the torrent algorithm. In this post I wrote a list of exam questions.

Classes were held twice a week. One lecture and one practice. Attendance is optional, which I used. Fortunately, the students of the Dresden Technical organized on their own the Wikipedia, which from year to year spread useful information to prepare for the exam.

Exam

60 minutes, written.
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Can use

English dictionary, paper and pen.

Cheating

This university is not accepted, if they notice, they are kicked out and put 0 points for the exam.

Assignments (one option for all)

1. HTML 5:
   
   • Briefly describe the features of HTML 5.
   • Describe 2 ways to store information on the client side that were embedded with HTML 5.
   • Compare HTTP Long polling with WebSockets.
   • Describe the process of creating a connection in WebSockets.
2. Name two XML processing methods and describe them.
3. Semantic networks:
   
   • What is the difference between RDFa, microtags and microformats.
   • Briefly describe:
     • XML
     • Rdf
     • Rdfs
     • Owl
4. Data management:
   
   • Compare Git and SVN.
   • Compare the implementation of branches in Git and SVN.
5. Explain in your own words what PageRank is. Write the basic formulas.
6. Briefly describe the three generations of shared data warehouses.
7. Having a node graph for implementing distributed storage based on Kademlia and a hash table of some nodes:
   
   • Find the maximum number of hops from node A to node B.
   • Graphically show the path from A to B.
   • Separate the hashes of other nodes into nodes using the bucket structure.

Answers took 5 sheets of A4. From my point of view, only the second question should be replaced. It was not clearly written, and many have raised questions. Most likely, the answer was meant SAX and DOM.

Starting today, I will continue preparing for the next exam, for which I allocated 10 days. The subject is called "Systems Engineering". The discipline includes a lot of topics such as Paxos, MapReduce, Chubby, BitTorrent, Dynamo, GFS, and more. If the post gets a good rating - I will post questions from the next exam.

It is very nice to understand that the university where you study is capable of teaching at a good modern level. Due to the close work of the university with German companies, each lecturer works part-time or is a consultant in the largest IT companies in the country.