I found the homeworks to be pretty interesting, but they're definitely time consuming, so start early. The exams are also as difficult as people say they are (we had an average of 51% on the midterm and 59% on the final). That being said, Professor Eggert is definitely enthusiastic about teaching the material and explains most concepts fairly well. I also recommend the textbook, because it came in pretty handy during the exams.

Quarter is not even over yet, and I can't stand the class anymore. Eggert for CS130 is fucking lame.

First of all, context:
CS130 is where you learn software developement cycles. The different stages of developing software, good software practice, etc.

Eggert being Eggert, potentially fun class projects turned into misery. This class can be so much fun if students got to work on their own projects that they were passionate about, projects that they can take with them after school is over and continue working on it. With good software design/practice, I believe students can come up with amazing stuff.

Instead, I'm fucking sitting here working on a software for my 'Client' that I dont give a shit about. The 'Client' is bitching that they want 'this' and 'that' functionality in their software. With the amount of tuition I pay, I feel like I'm paying for the opportunity to work of these 'Clients'.

Taking CS130 with Eggert will teach you how to become a corporate bitch.

This class can be much more fun if students get to decide on projects with classmates that they are all passionate about and work together to turn their ideas into reality. Let the students take leadership of their projects.

I hate this class.

Eggert is a very good lecturer, it just seemed like there was only time to give a handful of details about a giant subject matter. The exams, though, expected you to have a broad understanding of it all, so it made it tough to score anything presentable. Tuan is a great TA and has taught this class a few times before. He's a really big help. Go to his discussion if he's still teaching.
The other TAs seemed to be off the rails when it came to grading the non-technical projects, like the essay and the scribe notes. Really harsh grading on those. When you ask those TAs about this grading, they give totally baffling reasons. Ridiculous.
Most importantly, get a good lab partner, and remember that you can change partners between projects if it's not working out.

Eggert is an extremely smart, intelligent, funny, and insightful man; however, this does not always translate into a good teacher, and in the case of Eggert it depends on what the student puts in.

Eggert genuinely cares about his students knowledge, so much so that he purposely made his class have a very steep learning curve (as he made it clear by explicitly saying so in lecture). Eggert will come into class prepared to give very insightful lectures on whatever chapter he assigned for you to read in the textbook, but to even understand what he is talking about you need background knowledge and thus you must make an effort to learn the material BEFORE he lectures on it. There have been many lectures where I haven't read the chapter before hand and became completely lost simply because Eggert doesn't go backwards and explain a concept again unless you specifically ask him to (he is very nice and will go over anything you ask) but left on his own accord, he steamrolls ahead while you are left in the dust of your own confusion.

In addition to confusing lectures, that is nothing compared to the headaches you will receive from the project specs. Even in his specs, Eggert will believe that you always understand what he is saying without saying it and it shows when you have no idea even where to start in his project. Unlike Smallberg who explains in very good detail what is expected of you and how to approach it, Eggert barely explains what you need to accomplish. It seem at times even the TA's don't know the answers so you are forced to wait until the speak with the Professor once a week to know what you have to do.

And of course there are the dreaded tests. I have never been so unsure of my performance after a test as I have with Eggerts. Eggert will often ask one of two questions, a very very open ended question where you have to use the knowledge you learned in order to BS some answer to the best of your ability, or an problem whose answer relies solely on a very small detail you barely went over in class. Overall,they are incredibly difficult but if you know most of the concepts it is fairly easy to get above the average (as nearly no one understands anything).

Now having said all of this, I hope to take Eggert again. He is an engaging lecturer who care about the subject and his students, he just expects a huge amount of effort and creativity from them in order to do well. I know for a fact that I learned much more than those who took Reinmann's course but of course that comes with a cost as this was one of my most work intensive courses thus far while Reinmann's was an easy A or A+ for 90% of the class.
If I had to give any advice, take this course only if you want to learn. Really. I know it sounds stupid but if you just want a good GPA, an easy quarter, or you are taking this as a Tech Breath and aren't interested in a low level understanding of computers, then you are better off taking another Professor; but if this is what you came to UCLA to learn, I wouldn't waste an opportunity and take it with anyone else.

Unlike the first review here, my advice is to thoroughly read assigned readings on the course website and take down everything Eggert talked about in lectures. If you don't read those assigned readings, you won't understand anything from Eggert's lectures.

On his tests, there will be questions about what he mentioned in class in a few seconds. Most questions are "unrelated" to both the textbook and his lectures, but you will be able to reason many of them out if you understand 70% of the textbook and his lectures, In other words, you can 100 % work one question out if you understand concepts related to that question.

To get an A in Eggert's class is not difficult, but requires too much work.

Eggert is the best professor I've had at UCLA

Admittedly, he's also the hardest. This is both a function of the course material that he teaches being particularly difficult (I took him for CS111 (operating systems) and CS 131 (programming languages)) and the fact that he expects your life to revolve around his class.

Lectures: His biggest selling point is that his lectures are very interesting and very informative. He speaks loudly and clearly, with a lot of animation. It's kind of like watching a philosopher muse to himself about deep questions of the universe.

Projects: Hard. Really hard. He tells you the first day of class that you should expect to spend about 12 hours a week on projects, and I would say thats an underestimate. In CS 111, you do get a partner if you want one, so if you have a buddy you work well with, that's very helpful. Don't expect to go to too many parties while in one of his classes.

Tests: They're very difficult, due to their open-ended nature. The curve is pretty good (averages between 60 and 70 when I took the classes). It's also pretty hard to totally pwn a test, because it's pretty easy for them to doc you a few points here and there. This, combined with a lot of partial credit even for idiotic answers, has the effect of compacting the overall scores into a smaller range, meaning that you can't ace the tests and ignore the projects like some classes.

I would recommend an Eggert taught class for anyone who really wants to learn. If GPA and free time are more important to you than learning, don't take his class, because it's a difficult A.

Everything everyone had said about this class is true. But I really liked it. It's the "computer science sampler plate". You look into 9 different CS elements/programs/systems during the class. I thought it was very simillar to my previous tech internship experience.
My TA was very good and I learned a lot from her (Lauren Samy). Like in all CS classes, if you don't like your TA, GET OUT and get into another TA's discussion. Fast.
The projects were tricky, but they're not huge, like in CS31 or CS32.
No midterm and the project 10 presentations were really interesting.
You will be doing yourself a favor is you know Linux before you get in here. Just become familliar with basic navigation in the terminal and you'll have a good foundation. You'll be using Linux to get a round almost always.
The final wasn't horrifying, but it was long.
Like I said, overall, I liked this class.

I took 131 and 130 with Eggert.

Eggert is very engaging as a lecturer in 131, and the material is interesting. The textbook is pretty good but not especially memorable. Exams have surprisingly low average scores. Why? You have to know not just the languages you learned, as well as the lecture and reading material, but you also have to know how to tackle somewhat open-ended questions by applying what you learned. And to *write*. Yes, my fellow programmers, you have to learn how to do this thing called writing. And unfortunately that's not taught in the class. If you are able though, try to find exams from past years to see the style of questions.

As for projects, let me say first that you can go see what they are: the class websites showing the projects from previous years stay up, and the projects rarely change. Some projects are kind of just crappy and dubiously relevant to the class (I'm thinking of the Java concurrency one in particular) but most are interesting, eye-opening, and yes, quite challenging. You need to think in a new way - and especially, think in the spirit of the language you are using. Start early.

Take Eggert, you'll like the lectures and you'll learn a lot.

(Millstein's a great guy too though.)

On the other hand, Eggert's 130 is horrible. I can't really blame him though, because I can see how hard it is to design a class on software engineering effectively.

He's a good professor and interesting lecturer absolutely, but the workload is so heavy, and his exams are so tricky. His homework is so hard to understand. I spent a lot of time reading the ambiguous descriptions again and again rather than making progress, which is annoying. I learnt a lot about programming, but I hate wasting time understanding his homework descriptions.

Overall, this is a good class. You learn many valuable skills from a broad range of topics like git, multithreading, python, regex, and emacs. However, it is run quite poorly. You never see the professor, and only learn from the powerpoints given by your TA. My TA had a strong accent and I could barely understand him.

The projects vary in difficulty. Some take < 4 hours, some take 12+ hours. You are mostly left to figure out how to do the projects by yourself.

The final is written by your TA, so the difficulty depends on your TA. I thought my final was easy, but my friends in other sections said theirs was hard. You are graded on the curve of your section alone though.

A big problem in this class is the grading. Don't expect to get the grades back for assignments until after the final. And don't expect to find out what you got wrong. The grading policy lets you turn assignments in late for barely any penalty though, which is nice.

My advice is to start the projects early, even before the quarter starts (the website for past quarters is online, and it hardly changes from quarter to quarter.)