NEVER with Eggert anymore! Never!
Before I took this class, I assumed that the reviews on Bruinwalk is a bit too exaggerated. I changed my mind right after the midterm.
Exams are very hard and almost impossible to prepare. Homeworks takes a lot of time but how to do the homework is not taught in class. The Project is just enforcing your group to self-study a lot untaught stuff.
The worst point of this class is that you grade depends more on your classmate. If they work very hard, there will be almost no curve, and your effort is nothing in this case.
I did learn a lot through this class, but that kind of suffer make it not worth. I cannot imagine how happy my spring would be without CS 35L.

Some Bruinwalk reviews were helpful for me while taking this course, so I felt that I should provide another data point for this class. I also think that people typically read Bruinwalk reviews for strategies on how to do well in a course, so that’s what my review will mostly cater to. I hope this is useful if Prof. Eggert teaches more iterations of this class which is uncertain at this point in time.

TLDR:
To give yourself a good chance of doing well in this class, you need to have really good/organized (not necessarily concise) lecture notes and play around with concepts Eggert discusses to develop intuition. Make sure you really understand the lecture content (supplement your notes with Google searches, man pages, documentation, etc. to add details to your notes). Eggert exam questions typically test students’ intuition about concepts from lectures. His questions are akin to niche Stack Overflow questions. Developing an intuition for concepts will allow you to fish for more partial credit, which is the way that you do well on these exams. The graders are usually generous with partial credit. Pretty much everyone struggles through this course, so don’t feel bad if you feel lost. To be honest, this is one of those classes where you should stop worrying about how things will affect your GPA/grades, or else you will be super stressed.

Relevant prior knowledge I had:
Some simple UNIX commands (ls, cd). Knew some basic Git commands (add, commit, push). Played around with gdb once or twice. Same with Python. Took CS 31 and CS 32.

Homework:
Reviews from prior quarters give some tips on how to do well on these so I don’t have much to add. New to this quarter (Spring ‘24), there were LA assignment guides that helped students get through the assignments. This was super nice for assignment 6 (random byte stream generator). One of the LAs who contributed to these guides, Benson Liu, was pretty active on piazza to answer questions. Shout out to him. New to this quarter were autograder scripts that the TAs wrote. These were helpful despite some hiccups in the grading of the first assignment. You’d pretty much know your homework grade by the time you submitted it, so that was a nice benefit of having the autograders. You also had unlimited submissions so you could incrementally check that you are on the right path.

Project:
Not much to add here. It was graded leniently. Find a good group and start somewhat early. I feel like everyone spends a lot of time on it until the deadline, even groups who start early. That’s just from what I’ve observed.

Midterm:
I got around the median on this exam. During Spring 2024, the midterm was moved online because of the Palestine/Israel protest events that happened on campus. This probably led to quite a bit of cheating on the exam and I think that this may have been compensated for in the final grades.

Final:
I was able to score in the top 10% on this exam so that’s probably why I got an A. I think I did better on this exam because my answers were much more specific and detailed than those on my midterm. Prof. Eggert typically references an example or piece of code for many concepts in this class. Since my notes were organized (albeit 200+ pages long), I was able to reference relevant examples from lectures to strengthen my exam answers. Having tables of contents and a binder helped me do this. The grading rubrics for these exams tend to award answers that provide some specifics, so I think that worked in my favor. I’d aim for 5-9 sentences for the longer free-response questions. My wrist felt super sore doing this but I think it was necessary.

This is already a pretty long review, so I’ll just add some more comments that you may find insightful:

The class is graded on a curve which is why I talked about my exam grades relative to the class. Prof. Eggert doesn’t provide a methodology for his curve, but I think I got an especially helpful boost from the curve due to my performance on the final being significantly better than my performance on the midterm. Perhaps he was compensating for the online midterm. I know other people in this class felt that they didn’t receive much of a curve (the raw exam scores were relatively high). Nobody will really know though.

There were 2 Bruinwalk reviews for this quarter (Spring ‘24) posted before mine -- I wouldn’t take them super seriously though since they posted a review prior to the final. The final exam is 33% of the grade, so I’m not sure how you can give a reasonable review of a class without taking the final (especially one from Eggert!). To provide context, the first review for this quarter was posted right after the first assignment which is when those auto-grader hiccups happened. As I said before, these issues were resolved for the rest of the assignments.

Would I say that Eggert’s exams are mostly fair? Probably, with some exceptions. Namely, I’m thinking of a problem from our final exam that was not really related to anything covered in class. I’m not going to get into specifics, but I luckily had some knowledge of graph theory prior to the final. For my peers who had no experience with those concepts, I feel for them and can see how that question was unfair. Eggert may introduce new concepts on the exams -- he feels that these are moments where he has the class’ undivided attention to teach. I don’t agree with his philosophy here, but I think you can still do well on the exams by getting questions correct that were mostly related to lecture material.

I felt anxious at times while taking this class, especially after my midterm performance. I think the ideal way to deal with this is to stop worrying about your grade. Just focus on trying to maximize the content you learn from this class because it is useful material. As a bonus, you’ll likely end up with a better grade with that mindset.

Prof. Eggert was always kind and approachable when I asked him questions. His lectures are memorable. I’d suggest trying to attend every lecture in person.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but you may want to take CS 35L and CS 32 in the winter if you have some prior knowledge (more relevant prior knowledge than what I had when entering this class). I say this because the medians for the exams have been much higher in the spring than in winter/fall (70s vs. 50s). CS 35L + CS 32 quarter would be a ton of work, but the spring averages are just so unbelievably high. For reference, 400 people took CS 33 in the spring (the large majority of which were freshmen). Around 170 people took CS 35L in the spring (with a large number being freshmen). The freshmen who take this class in the spring tend to be some of the top in their class, so you might have a better chance to outperform your classmates in the fall/winter.

Paul Eggert is the greatest lecturer I have ever witnessed. He is so passionate about teaching, and it's remarkable how he is so knowledgable while also so good at understanding what it's like to not know things. It is truly an honor to attend CS 35L lectures. Assignments and exams are also very well made. I thought that grading was error-prone, and TAs were not very responsive, but I still enjoyed homework assignments and exams regardless. The LAs, on the other hand, were fantastic. I don't think software construction is a topic I enjoy much, but this class put forth an incredible effort to change that.

AVOID THIS FUCKED UP CLASS AT ALL COST!!! The syllabus and Eggert's teaching is horrible because he's trying to squeeze AT LEAST 2 quarters worth of contents into 10 weeks. The autograder policy he implemented makes this class a fucking nightmare. Yes. one typo will make you get a zero on ALL subsequent keystrokes even if you got them right. I spent like 10 hours for each assignment trying to redo my dribble files again and again just to make the autograder accept my attempt even though I understood how does emacs really work. This class needs a reform ASAP and I don't think Eggert is a great lecturer.

This class is actually so horrible lol. The material covered is so crucial to being a programmer and I think this class has an insane amount of potential, but Eggert's teaching philosophy kills it. On HW, you basically get thrown into the deep end on purpose because programmers are supposed to be able to pick up new technologies on the fly. Well, unless you're one of the smartest people in the class, this approach will really just teach you that cheating is necessary for success. Tests are literal RNG as he picks random moments (often incredibly irrelevant ones) from lecture to turn into terribly phrased, often ambiguous questions. Although I did very well on the final and poor on the midterm, I strongly believe that neither of those tests were even a remotely accurate representation of what I knew or what was covered in class/projects. The one highlight of this class is the group project, I had a good group and found it the most fun and rewarding thing I have done at UCLA. Overall though, get ready for the relentless stress this class brings, and pray that you are smarter than your classmates as this is a pretty competitive class in terms of grading.

I feel like I learned nothing. Class was too hard for no reason. Averages for test were around 45%. No regrades allowed for finals. TAs graded tests completely wrong.

Finally passed this class. I only need a D- to get my degree, so this grade exceeds my expectations.

genuinely one of the best professor's i've ever had, and i'm not even a cs major lol

Oh Eggert. Sweet sweet Eggert. The grade lottery I am playing right now and don't know where I'll come out on the other side. Needless to say, the midterm was horrid. I cannot wait for the final (to be even worse). I like his lecture style, I don't find the information to be presented in a way that's hard to handle, but where I draw the line is the labs being worth abyssmally little percentages and taking hours on end. I know this is for our benefit, but if I'm putting in the effort to get a good grade on the lab, I wish it mattered more. Another thing. The project. THE project. Basically zero guidance on where to start and what you need to know. It follows the Standard Eggert Model: self teach. But I literally pay so much money for these classes that there is zero point to self teach. If I wanted to do that, I wouldn't have gone to college. Simple as that.

I don't know why people keep giving this class a bad review. It's a great class and I learned a ton from Eggert!

I think as it is with all Eggert classes, he bins you on the final based on ur project grades. So make your project grades are very high (other wise you'll suffer more than the bad project grade!)