He would often spend way too long explaining one simple function/idea. It was an overload of extra information not needed. In short, I felt time spent in this class wasn’t efficient. I truly learned much more in my 20-30min MATLAB lectures (PSY20B) than in Smallberg’s ~2hour lectures.
He also gives a short amount of time for difficult exams

Took this class online spring 2020. Smallberg is a great teacher by going to lecture I learned everything I needed and never read the textbook. Only issue he takes forever to grade anything so you never know how well you are doing in the class. Test can be stressful becomes of the time crunch so make sure you know the coding syntax very well before hand.

The workload is super heavy, the lectures are long and boring, and I found his midterms and finals to be unreasonably long and difficult considering the short amount of time he gave us to complete them (exam formats might have been different since I took it online). The projects are extremely time consuming, so I spent majority of my week working on them. i personally don't really like his teaching style, as he just rambles on and on making it difficult to follow along, especially if you're new to programming like I was.

Smallberg is a good lecturer for intro CS courses. He has a very clear thought process, rarely makes mistakes, and makes pretty good analogies to help us understand. He’s taught this many many times so it comes very naturally to him. The course itself is not hard if you’ve taken AP Com Sci. Exams are fair — one cheat sheet per midterm and two cheat sheets for final.

I genuinely enjoyed his lectures throughout the quarter. Like most other reviews, he did a great job covering the material with great depth. He makes the effort to make sure we understood the underlying principles of what we were learning, instead of just understanding the basics. I had taken AP Computer Science A in high school and generally felt comfortable throughout the class. But Smallberg taught me more about computer science with more depth than I had learned in high school. The projects were relatively short, taking only two to four hours a week. They became increasingly difficult towards the end of the quarter, but there were ample resources to guide you.

With that said, I think it's important to mention that the challenges confronting this quarter were unique considering the pandemic and George Floyd protests. Smallberg didn't want to mislead us about what our grade would be, since he mentioned he didn't want to get in trouble last quarter. But what ended up happening is that we never got our midterm and our final grades back (for reference, it's been two weeks since the quarter ended). He made it a point that the midterms wouldn't be worth more than 10% of the grade and that the final would be no-harm, which I really appreciate. But we genuinely had no idea what our grade was throughout the quarter since the syllabus wasn't released until midterms week and the grade distribution wasn't released until Week 10. He said that he was still working with the CS department to figure out how to grade the class. But by the time he had a rough idea and we had received our estimated grades, we only had two hours until the deadline to decide if we wanted to take the class P/NP.

Based on other reviews and my experience with him, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I've heard that the CS department can be notoriously slow, and Smallberg's delay in grading is probably a consequence of them and not him. Nevertheless, I would've appreciated more transparency about the grading process so we that we had a general idea of our grade throughout the quarter, especially for students who wanted to take the class P/NP.

Of course, this quarter was unique, and so were the administrative issues we had. But, if I had the chance, I would definitely take a class with him again. He's a great professor and I learned a lot more about CS because of him.

As far as the material goes, I thought the class was very reasonable and well paced. Smallberg is a pretty good lecturer and takes time to help everyone understand by going over topics in several different ways (analogies, directly with the code, and so on). However, this quarter (online due to COVID-19) was terribly unorganized. We weren’t told the details about midterms until the day before, and we were barely given any grades until the end of tenth week. We also weren’t given a grading scheme until the end of tenth week, and we still don’t have a real syllabus even now after the class has ended. I felt bad because smallberg seemed very stressed with the switch to online, but keeping students in the dark for ten weeks just seemed unprofessional and added additional stress. He also never seemed apologetic and was dismissive of students trying to ask about grades. I understand that he probably got a lot of people emailing him, but, really, what can he expect when people need to know if they should drop or switch to p/np? I also thought it wasn’t very nice that the practice midterms he gave were a completely different format (mostly multiple choice) from his actual midterm (typing out long passages of code). I had decided to open the midterm on my smaller tablet so I could work out code on my bigger laptop and couldn’t switch devices after opening the timed test- don’t make my mistake in the future. Outside from the logistical issues, I did enjoy the projects and the lectures, and I felt like I learned a decent amount about coding.

I have prior experience in CS, so this class was largely a breeze for me. I'm writing this review instead for all those taking the professor while our classes continue to be online due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. As an international student, I found Smallberg to be incredibly, incredibly accommodating, particularly given we numbered only around 15 of a 350 person class. He gave us an alternative times for both midterms and the final, and recorded and uploaded all his lectures (bless 2x speed). The final was also no-harm due to the circumstances. Only complaint: zybooks. A $77 waste of a textbook. It involved annoying, participation based labs which although they may have been helpful to others, are not worth the price we paid for them, especially given that we could get a pdf of the regular textbook, or just practice code on one of the hundred other websites out there, for free.

Very very solid professor. I came into this class with no confidence in my programming abilities, thinking that I would never be able to "get" how to code. Smallberg proved me wrong. A lot of people complain about his pacing but if you're like me and really wanna know how to code properly and understand the concepts, Smallberg's your man. He is very thorough in his teaching and explains the concepts, example code and even all possible errors you can make in a very comprehensive manner. The projects are alright, although watch out for Project 3 (a big step up from Project 1 and 2) and Project 7 (takes some time to digest all the scaffold code that's given to you). Shout out to the TA Alejandro Zapata too - he was super helpful and amazing! Overall, I'd 100% recommend Smallberg's CS31.

CS31 with Smallberg was a pretty interesting experience. Smallberg knows C++ inside out and is extremely informative. He is a good teacher but his midterms and final were pretty tricky. Smallberg is also a bit too strict when it comes to projects.

He is focusing a lot on details, which can help you prevent errors but makes the lecture pretty slow. He would generally answer your questions, but not for some of them, because usually they involve more advanced knowledge, and I guess he does not want to create confusion to other people in the class. If you really want to know more about computer science, go to the office hours!