As an EE major with little programming experience, I struggled in this class. Carey is a great professor. His lectures are engaging, fun, and really helpful in gaining a better understanding of the material in the simplest way possible. Every week there is one or more deadlines for homework or projects. The first two projects are fairly simple and straightforward requiring only a few hours of work. Projects 3 and 4, on the other hand, require an insane amount of work and will probably take up most of your time. I would suggest avoiding taking this class in the winter of your freshman year simply because the knowledge and experience some of the people in the class have is almost impossible to catch up with. Given that most CS majors have to take the class at that time, the difficulty of the course is much higher than it would be in other quarters of the academic year. Regardless of your programming experience, the constant deadlines and assignments are exhausting especially heading towards the end of the quarter. Once again, Carey is a great professor and a wonderful person so if you are going to take this class I would recommend taking it with him.

If you didn't take CS 32 with Nachenburg, you missed out.

This is probably the single best class any UCLA CS student could take. Carey is incredibly smart and qualified since he worked as a lead engineer at several companies like Google and Lyft, and on top of that, his lectures are super entertaining, fun, and relaxed. His slides are also amazing and many students continue to use them for job interview prep years after finishing CS32. No student will ever regret signing up for a class with Carey.

Carey and David Smallberg together put together one of the best data structures and algorithm classes in the country. Would 200% recommend Carey and this class to anyone.

I personally did not enjoy my experience in Carey's class. Simply put, Carey was obsessed with the idea of making class "fun." In a single 2 hour lecture, we took a break every 30 minutes for 10 minutes to play an unnecessary game like Mad Libs or Two Truths and a Lie. At one point he showed us a gross picture of an unknown black substance and asked us to guess what it was. After nobody could guess what it was, he revealed that it was a picture of his own earwax. On every other slide he included multiple "funny" outdated memes or gifs. The slides were written in Comic Sans and sometimes included juvenile jokes about farts, butts or poop. For one lecture, he wore a rainbow dreadlocks wig. He invited a guest to talk about their experience in the industry, but they were a past student who had nothing to say for the whole lecture except the one time when they had to come up with two truths and a lie during one of our three 10 minute breaks. It was frustrating to me because I felt like I wasn't being taken seriously as a student. I came to class to learn about Computer Science and instead I felt like I was watching a circus.

I will say that I understand how students like him as a professor. He cares for his students and wants everybody to understand the course material. And I could tell that he truly enjoys teaching. But for someone like me who just couldn't stand his teaching style, I got by fine just reading the slides and supplementing with Smallberg's lectures.

BEST CS PROF EVER. He explains data structures in a super beginner-friendly way along with his hand-made powerpoint animations. His lectures are so fun with his life stories in the software industry. He also asks previous students to talk about how they step into the industry and giving college suggestions. Even if I don't remember the data structures on day, I'll still rememeber these inspiring stories. The only one con is that the lectures and projects cover too much OOP instead of data structures. Should talk more about graphs and balanced tree.

Carey’s colossal voice made me break out into goofy grins and unabashed tears

Nachenberg is a very good professor who teaches very clearly with slides and decent examples. A lot of material is covered, but the LA worksheets are very helpful, and the first few projects will keep you on track. The dreaded project 3 is a major time consumer, so I highly recommend allocating multiple hours a week to do well on this project. It is manageable but requires lots and lots of time. The tests were hard but generally manageable as well, but if you get stuck just move on; don't waste too much time on one portion or else the time will be up before you know it. Overall, I highly recommend Nachenberg but make sure to put in the time because this class can be very demanding - but also very rewarding.

Carey is a godlike professor and even godlier at doing pushups

Carey is my favorite professor that I've had so far. He's a very good lecturer and he's really funny. In the quarter that I took it in, we had guest hosts who would stay during the lecture and tell us stories of what it's like to work in SWE and whether or not the concept we were learning about was used at their job. The projects are a huge step up from CS31, expect to spend a lot of time during the last 4 weeks of class because you have Project 3 due week 8 and project 4 and hw5 due a couple days before the final. Carey will make this class really enjoyable for you so even if you have Smallberg, attend Carey's lectures. He's a silly goose that you need to have as a professor.

I really enjoyed CS 32 with Carey (yes he goes by his first name). He really did a fantastic job entertaining his students virtually, and I believe his enthusiasm and sense of humor make him an excellent choice for CS 32. I can see how he could have been even better in person, but the extent to which he engages his students online impressed me. He invites guests to come speak about their experience in the industry for literally EVERY class session. He understands that it's pretty hard to focus for two hours straight, so he hosts "detox sessions" where he allows his guests to conduct an AMA with students (how nice!). He knows how to crack jokes at the right moment, and has a strong sense of knowing what topics may bore students and spices them up with activities he has planned.

His projects are not as hard as people say they are (Project 3 took time but was really easy in hindsight, Project 4 was harder but 6 days was enough to finish). The midterms are fairly straightforward (though if Carey had spent more time explaining templates, this would have made the second midterm way easier). The final, on the other hand, was on a different level than both midterms in terms of difficulty (hard!), but he did a great job preparing us for it by frequently quizzing us on Big O. Big O did end up dominating the final.

Grading was incredibly slow for this class (haven't gotten back scores for projects 3,4, the final, and BOTH midterms). But I'm not complaining as Carey and Smallberg do their best to make CS 32 enjoyable for students.

Edit: CS 32 final grades were released the first day of the spring quarter, less than two hours before the deadline. I miraculously ended up with an A+, even though I didn't do that great on project 4 (2 points above the median). Guess there truly is a curve :)