Firstly, Eggert didn't interact with my class a single time (in person or online). He leaves all the instruction to the TAs, who don't really know what they're doing. My TA was a nice guy, but I didn't really learn much from him.

The class is a crash-course on Unix environments, everything from Vim to SSH plus some C and Python thrown in. I think it's trying to prepare you for real work in software engineering. The problem with this is that everything the class teaches can be learned very easily on-the-job. I knew most of the topics already through previous work, and I had a better understanding of them through work then through this class. So in my opinion, this class presented everything in the most complicated manner and I don't think it would actually help people to understand professional software engineering.

The assignments are formatted horribly, so you have to expend a lot of time and effort to just figure out what they want you to do. The actual topics, as I said earlier, are quite easy. The hard thing about this class is dealing with the terrible specs.

The final was a bit rough. You should bring a bunch of examples of Python and C and bash programming (print out all your code from the quarter).

In conclusion, this is probably the worst class I've taken at UCLA. Since it's a requirement, I really hope they fix it. But if you are taking it, I recommend just pushing through and working heavily with your friends. Good luck.

(FWIW, I still ended up with an A in the class)

I spent most of my quarter on 35L. The concepts/projects aren't really difficult, it's just figuring EVERYTHING out by yourself. The lectures the TA's give don't teach you how to approach the problem or anything really useful about solving them. One of the TA's named Joseph (I think) had slides that went over the steps for the labs (i.e. what you need to do/how to do it) that were extremely helpful. The 10th homework was great! :) (just needed to write a review about an article, which was great as all my other classes were piling it on during 10th week)

I heard someone mention that the difficulty in CS35L is in the concepts, not the project. This is mildly true, but the projects are completely non-conducive to learning the concepts.

I myself knew everything there was to know in this class beforehand, and each project took a max of 2 hours. However, I had a friend in the class who had never done anything with Linux, and his frustration was palpable. The only help the TAs really gave us is to "use the man page," which is a hell of a lot of help when you're having small corner case issues that really just take experience to get know.

He could have structured the projects in a more progressive and educative way, kindof like how many video games include a semi-tutorial level to help you get acquainted with the controls, but he didn't. Just jumped to a mini-boss straight from the start.

The difficulty in 35L is lies in not in the projects, but in understanding the content. Like many have suggested before the quality of the TA fluctuates significantly for any given quarter. Also since there is a new assignment every week on a new subject area, it may be harder to grasp a concept in only 4 hours of class time. That being said, Google is your best friend for this class. There is definitely a lot of resourceful documentation available online for each topic because the scope of this class is introductory. However, I would recommend only limited to no use of Google for assignment 1. That way you gain a better understanding of navigating the Linux man pages.
The assignment that took me the longest time was assignment 9. I found this link useful: https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/pthreads/ . Try drawing parallels with parallel computing in CS33(OMP and CUDA).
Other recommendations:
• Take advantage of Piazza (an online forum) that we will be using for this class.
• Use some sort of virtual machine (ie VirtualBox, VMWare Player,etc). Dual booting is really annoying.
• Sounds lame, but bring some sort of Linux/Shell Scripting textbook to the final(it’s open book and notes). Unless you’re already some godly guru, having this reference is invaluable
• Learn HotKeys for Ubuntu/Vim/Emacs ie.
o In Ubuntu:
 Alt-t to open terminal
 Ctrl-Shift-t to create new tab
 Alt-number to navigate between tabs
Reflections: I came into this class having little to no experience with Linux and CLI(Command Line Interface). At first Vim/Emacs may seem difficult at first, but you’ll be fine once you get in to the flow of things. Although this class is only 2 units, the stuff you learn is pretty practical. Good luck!

This course is kind of hard and tedious. I was only able to finish all of the assignents by going to my TA's office hours. For me, the hardest assignments were weeks 2,3,5, and 9, so start early on those. Googling topics was helpful, especially for the 2nd and 3rd assignments. This link was helpful for the Python assignment: http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html

The assignments are ok in terms of work and difficulty. The experience of this course depends almost entirely on the TA that you have. Avoid a bad TA at all costs. My TA for this quarter can't explain things as clearly. What's worse, the grading procedure is like, each TA has about three assignments to grade. My TA spends almost the entire quarter to grade his first assignment. But it turns out he just uses two test cases, which means if your code has a tiny flaw and happens to fail his one test, you get 50% of the grade. I understand only the perfect code deserves full credit, but I can't imagine what is more unfair than to have your grades depend in such a big proportion on luck, given that everyone has a chance to make small mistakes.

Ok, so I'm about to graduate and I'm writing in response to the people that say Eggerts 35L is too hard and will hurt your gpa. Firstly, if you're struggling with 35L you should probably just change your major, because frankly, 35L is probably one of the easiest classes you will take in your undergraduate cs career. Secondly, get used to shitty specs, they will only get worse, just wait until you take 131.