I'm writing this review for the course, not the professor since he's not at UVA anymore. This is mostly a "you get it or you don't class," since you need to understand assembly code very well to do anything, and if you do it's basically a piece of cake. I originally found myself in the "don't get it" category, but I went to office hours and was able to ultimately understand it by the end of the course. If you come in understanding the main ideas, you will cruise as did many more experienced students. The whole course is essentially about modifying a previously compiled program to change it to do something else, either by writing a binary string as input or writing a virus in the code. There isn't much actual "defense," it's really a hacking class that teaches you how to exploit a program. We had to sign an agreement at the beginning not to use what we had learned for malicious purposes. I would say overall it was a worthwhile class especially if you're interested in security or want to gain a deeper understanding of how your code works at a low level.

I took this class last spring. Would not recommend. To my worst enemy. Ever.