Smallberg is very talented at teaching. During his lectures, you know you are learning the details of C++ (and not just skimming the topics), and that he knows his stuff very well. You can ask him pretty much any technical question and he can answer it. After his lectures, you aren't left with many questions though, as he makes sure to cover the most frequently asked questions within lecture itself. Would 100% recommend. I actually am taking CS 32 now and prefer Smallberg's teaching style over Nachenberg's style (but both are good). Take CS31 with Smallberg if possible, you learn a lot and the class is very reasonably graded. The tests (2 midterms and final) are very fair in difficulty. The projects can take a while to complete so the workload can a bit large, but it's still managable.

Just so any future students know, Professor Smallberg is reputed to be one of the *most engaging and thorough* lecturers in the CS department. His ratings were spectacular before fall quarter, after which for some reason an army of discontent students expressed grievances which I personally didn't experience.
He really takes things step by step so that we can understand them. You can tell he works hard on his teaching, and the effect is a great learning experience (that is, if you attend lectures).

Smallberg is a solid professor and teaches this class well! He teaches you everything you need to know to ace his tests, the projects are very manageable even for non-CS majors, and he and the TAs are very helpful. Lectures can be a bit bland at times, but Smallberg understands this stuff very well and his teaching style is very straightforward. Overall, you can't go wrong with the berg.

Despite many warnings from professors, other bruinwalk reviews, and fellow students. I took this class in the fall without any experience. I felt that I was definitely able to keep up in this class. Professor Smallberg's recordings were very thorough and the textbook was very helpful in terms of understanding concepts. Homeworks are very easy. Projects were hard but were a great way to apply and learn concepts. Each took a reasonable amount of time and for the ones that I spent 8+ hours on, it was expected. Coming in with no experience, it was hard finding people who were willing to help and be patient with me but I made it through the quarter. I ended up with a B which I am totally happy with given my zero experience.

He would often spend way too long explaining one simple function/idea. It was an overload of extra information not needed. In short, I felt time spent in this class wasn’t efficient. I truly learned much more in my 20-30min MATLAB lectures (PSY20B) than in Smallberg’s ~2hour lectures.
He also gives a short amount of time for difficult exams

Took this class online spring 2020. Smallberg is a great teacher by going to lecture I learned everything I needed and never read the textbook. Only issue he takes forever to grade anything so you never know how well you are doing in the class. Test can be stressful becomes of the time crunch so make sure you know the coding syntax very well before hand.

The workload is super heavy, the lectures are long and boring, and I found his midterms and finals to be unreasonably long and difficult considering the short amount of time he gave us to complete them (exam formats might have been different since I took it online). The projects are extremely time consuming, so I spent majority of my week working on them. i personally don't really like his teaching style, as he just rambles on and on making it difficult to follow along, especially if you're new to programming like I was.

Smallberg is a good lecturer for intro CS courses. He has a very clear thought process, rarely makes mistakes, and makes pretty good analogies to help us understand. He’s taught this many many times so it comes very naturally to him. The course itself is not hard if you’ve taken AP Com Sci. Exams are fair — one cheat sheet per midterm and two cheat sheets for final.

I genuinely enjoyed his lectures throughout the quarter. Like most other reviews, he did a great job covering the material with great depth. He makes the effort to make sure we understood the underlying principles of what we were learning, instead of just understanding the basics. I had taken AP Computer Science A in high school and generally felt comfortable throughout the class. But Smallberg taught me more about computer science with more depth than I had learned in high school. The projects were relatively short, taking only two to four hours a week. They became increasingly difficult towards the end of the quarter, but there were ample resources to guide you.

With that said, I think it's important to mention that the challenges confronting this quarter were unique considering the pandemic and George Floyd protests. Smallberg didn't want to mislead us about what our grade would be, since he mentioned he didn't want to get in trouble last quarter. But what ended up happening is that we never got our midterm and our final grades back (for reference, it's been two weeks since the quarter ended). He made it a point that the midterms wouldn't be worth more than 10% of the grade and that the final would be no-harm, which I really appreciate. But we genuinely had no idea what our grade was throughout the quarter since the syllabus wasn't released until midterms week and the grade distribution wasn't released until Week 10. He said that he was still working with the CS department to figure out how to grade the class. But by the time he had a rough idea and we had received our estimated grades, we only had two hours until the deadline to decide if we wanted to take the class P/NP.

Based on other reviews and my experience with him, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I've heard that the CS department can be notoriously slow, and Smallberg's delay in grading is probably a consequence of them and not him. Nevertheless, I would've appreciated more transparency about the grading process so we that we had a general idea of our grade throughout the quarter, especially for students who wanted to take the class P/NP.

Of course, this quarter was unique, and so were the administrative issues we had. But, if I had the chance, I would definitely take a class with him again. He's a great professor and I learned a lot more about CS because of him.

As far as the material goes, I thought the class was very reasonable and well paced. Smallberg is a pretty good lecturer and takes time to help everyone understand by going over topics in several different ways (analogies, directly with the code, and so on). However, this quarter (online due to COVID-19) was terribly unorganized. We weren’t told the details about midterms until the day before, and we were barely given any grades until the end of tenth week. We also weren’t given a grading scheme until the end of tenth week, and we still don’t have a real syllabus even now after the class has ended. I felt bad because smallberg seemed very stressed with the switch to online, but keeping students in the dark for ten weeks just seemed unprofessional and added additional stress. He also never seemed apologetic and was dismissive of students trying to ask about grades. I understand that he probably got a lot of people emailing him, but, really, what can he expect when people need to know if they should drop or switch to p/np? I also thought it wasn’t very nice that the practice midterms he gave were a completely different format (mostly multiple choice) from his actual midterm (typing out long passages of code). I had decided to open the midterm on my smaller tablet so I could work out code on my bigger laptop and couldn’t switch devices after opening the timed test- don’t make my mistake in the future. Outside from the logistical issues, I did enjoy the projects and the lectures, and I felt like I learned a decent amount about coding.