A lot of people were ragging on him for being slow with grading this quarter (Spring 2020), but objectively that's a pretty minor consideration when you're evaluating the effectiveness of a professor. Smallberg teaches the class very well. As a lot of reviews have already said, he's not the most engaging lecturer due to how much he pores over the details, but if you pay attention, you'll find that he really does such a good job explaining concepts. I always came out of lecture understanding a new topic pretty well.
There's obviously a lot of complaints about the workload, which does get pretty heavy after week 6. But it's NOT unmanageable. Yes, Project 3 is extremely tedious and does take 20-30 hours to complete, but we get two weeks to do it. If you plan properly, you'll be fine. Smallberg was actually lenient this quarter and gave a relatively easy Project 4, and yet people still love to complain.
Honestly I don't get all the hate Smallberg gets. This dude works harder than any professor I've ever had. He designs unique projects each quarter for CS32, and that means he also has to come up with new test cases every time. Grading in this class is a more intense process than others, so it's obviously going to take longer than other classes to get grades back.
Overall, I would definitely recommend this class with Smallberg. I never attended Nachenberg's lectures so I can't give a comparison, but I will say that this class with Smallberg taught me a lot, and is a very valuable class to have under your belt.

Though Smallberg was quite slow on grading (thanks to his dual 31/32 teaching workload), he was an effective and thorough lecturer. Overall the content was far more interesting than CS 31, with the homeworks and projects not being terribly difficult (concept wise). Since the content pacing was kind of slow, reading Nachenberg's slides helped a lot. Project 3 was a huge time suck, but good enough planning (and starting early) made it mostly manageable in the end. Due to COVID, the midterms were a weird single question format, and the final was made no-harm (though it was significantly harder than the midterms). TAs and LAs were helpful and responsive. Good luck!

Smallberg is a legend. I'm just here to add to the abundance of reviews for this beautiful man.

Flatulants on the road
Ghostracers chasing lost souls
Got myself a coffee
Spilled some on my shirt

USC grads make no dollars
I and Carey are bad spellerz
Memory leak is wrong wrong wrong
For this project, you do not need to submit a report. You're welcome.

Had taken CS 31 and CS 32 virtually with Smallberg. He does not usually use slides, he sometimes writes codes in Word, and the lectures can get boring. BUT STILL, he's an absolute legend and a wonderful man. Let's boost this man's rating.

Just here to boost lil berg's stats.

Overall, despite the incredibly slow grading and lack of clarity behind the grading scheme which we were not given until the week 10, Smallberg is incredibly knowledgable in C++. Granted I hope the world never goes into chaos mode as it did during not only the beginning but the latter half of spring quarter, Smallberg continued to be fairly understanding. I won't lie I thought this class was incredibly difficult, even as I attended every lecture I felt as though I had no basis to start some homeworks and most projects (project 3 ..). However Proj3 is actually graded really generously with lots of room to earn points without completing every bit of the project. His lectures can feel dry and not the most engaging, but I have without a doubt learned so much in this course that I am incredibly glad I took it.
*for reference I am not a CS major so this class was out of my general interest

小宝讲课用来学习，南宝讲课用来下饭

As a non-CS major, and someone who has pretty neutral feelings towards coding as a whole, I'm pretty mixed on this class. Projects are okay, pretty large time suck and often difficult. I didn't watch many of Smallberg's lectures and relied heavily on Nachenberg's slides, which got me through the projects without too much trouble. I hate the tests, mostly because I'm terrible at working through the bugs in a time-pressure situation. Having to switch between CCLE and visual studio on a time limit was stressful for me, and I think it gave an advantage to people with better home computer set-ups (I took one midterm on a laptop and one with two monitors and a nicer keyboard and felt much less stressed with the monitors/keyboard). So I definitely recommend getting all set up if you're going to be taking an online test with Smallberg. I was also a little annoyed that the "practice tests" were nothing like the tests we were taking-- I assume this is because they were modeled after the in person tests, but I really did not feel like they prepared me for the actual test. Overall, though, I don't think this class could be taught all that differently and it was an okay experience. As others have mentioned, I do wish Smallberg had been a little faster with scoring so that I could've made P/NP decisions or had a better feel for how I'd done on tests and projects (I made some of the same mistakes on multiple exams and didn't even know until another classmate happened to ask me about a similar thing), so just a bit frustrating. This was my second quarter with Smallberg though, and I would probably take him again if I could.

just here to get smallberg another page of reviews

ngl tho, projects 3,4 take a lot of time but are decently fun.
hes reasonable (midterm 2 had something that he didnt teach so he made it a no-harm midterm)
he teaches very clearly

tbh smallberg > carey b/c smallberg teaches with more detail/ u get a better conceptual understanding

everything else probably is already enumerated in his other reviews lol

also friendly reminder pls leave bruinwalk reviews