This class was so hard. I think most CS majors don't expect hardware stuff and so the material is completely brand new. Tests and lab 1 was overkill, the other stuff was ok. Read the book, as I barely went to class and just read the book and did ok.

Eggert is infamous for a reason; his exams are ridiculously difficult! The class average for the first midterm was 30% despite open-note open-book policy. Every time I walked out of an Eggert exam, I felt like I had been grilled on information that hadn't been noted on the study materials. They were a terrible experience, and jarring after reasonable-feeling Smallberg exams. If Eggert didn't curve his class, he'd probably have four or five students pass out of sixty.

His projects were okay, but the specs of the projects were very unclear. Students took to Piazza to ask TAs over 20 questions per project, just to clarify what Eggert was grading at all.

Eggert's lectures are boring and difficult to follow, but necessary for the class. He doesn't release slides or notes. Make sure you read the textbook before going to class.

Overall, I got the feeling that Eggert is truly brilliant as a computer scientist, but that he assumes all his students are equally brilliant and can quickly comprehend what he says (or read between the lines if they don't). As a result, he's not a good professor at all, despite his obvious mastery of computer systems and programming.

Much better than Eggert's CS 33. Concentrate in class, and you will learn a lot.

As someone who watched friends take 131 with Millstein, it blows my mind that Eggert's 131 class fulfills the same requirement as Millstein's. In short, 131 with Eggert is dramatically more time consuming and challenging than with Millstein. The projects in this class are incredibly difficult due to the strangely vague specs, the lack of consistency between what's taught in lecture and what's required in the projects, and the amount of time these projects take. Be prepared to spend anywhere from 15-30+ hours a week on this class, depending on the current week's project. One positive note about the projects is the incredible help we get from the TAs. These are some of the best TAs I've had in all of my time here.

Professor Eggert was a terrible lecturer. He did not have a clear outline and often meandered off into meaningless in-depth side topics that barely anyone could understand.

It's not too difficult to receive a good grade in that class, but that never meant he was actually good at teaching me anything. His tests were not directly relevant to the class material and were honestly a measure of how well you could bs the answer.

Don't be fooled by other positive reviews from people who thought he was a good teacher after receiving a good grade. His only job is to teach yet he does it very poorly. Comparing him to Smallberg or Nachenberg, he is in a separate lower league.

This class is a lab... and it is curved based on the section. I ended up with a smart section unluckily and got a raw score of 88%. The final was apparently too easy...

I would say the concepts are very useful but the course is still poorly structured despite the changes including use of Beaglebone for one of the assignments. It is just that there is not really any real way to learn these concepts unless you practice using these tools outside of class. People who are familiar with Python and git will probably be in an advantage over the others just because there are just some things that if you are a beginner, you just won't know. You just won't suddenly master the nuances of a particular tool over one week - years of software engineering experience, or at the very least experiences with multiple side projects, will fare you better in learning these tools than reading the manual or something of that kind.

I take many classes with Eggert, and this class is particularly BAD! Eggert is known for hard class, so he is trying to make this class hard as well. Since the topic of the class is by nature easy, he chooses to torture students with unnecessary big amount of reading, random questions in quiz and ridiculous exams. Frankly I think he pretty enjoys keeping people busy, no matter it really helps students or not.

Like most of the courses Eggert teaches, the material is quite interesting and has a lot of potential for being really enjoyable. Unfortunately, the way its taught makes the course frustrating.

To start off, the lectures are engaging but are often irrelevant for the content that's going to be tested. If listening to a really great computer scientist talk endlessly about the history of CS and take countless tangents into obscure details (often unrelated to assignments) is your thing, Eggert's your guy. For example, there have been numerous times when Eggert STARTed lecturing on course content that would have been VERY useful to have while working on the project... the project that was due yesterday.

TAs in this class are your best friend. Find a good one, read homework specs before discussions, and ask the TA as many questions as you can. The homeworks are incredibly time-consuming and confusing. I feel like I was able to pick up the languages we worked on somewhat quickly but even so, I spent an average of ~15 hours working on each of the 6 homeworks (and one project).

To say a few good things about the course:
- Learning a diverse set of languages is really cool. You realize that the way the languages you initially learned (C, C++, Python, JS, etc.) take a lot of features for granted that don't necessarily need to be done that way.
- Once you understand how to do the homeworks and get a groove going, it can actually be kind of fun.

professor answers no questions. ta's answer few questions. students write poems on piazza crying regarding the workload. plenty of students skip the final because they already failed to turn one or two of 7 hw/projects. we cover way too much material and the work load will kill you. we had 2 projects due within 2 days of each other during 10th week. lecture is a complete waste of time. the book (although interesting) is useless for the tests/projects.
i seriously do not encourage you to take this professor. if you have to take this professor, be ready to guess your way through tests.

If you're reading this that means you're probably new to UCLA, or the CS department, because you're wondering how Eggert is. Either that, or you took him for 111 and are curious if he's different. Short answer - not really. No professor gives me as much internal conflict as Eggert. His exams are impossible, and his projects unbelievably time consuming and difficult to understand. However, as was the case when I took him for 111, when I walked out of the final I thought to myself, "damn, I learned a ton in that class." If you actually do the projects you'll learn a lot more than from most other CS classes, but you'll suffer mightily while it's happening. I'd analogize his class to the Navy SEAL training camp of UCLA CS. Tough love from daddy Eggert, but hell, he'll make you good.