This class is definitely challenging, but overall wasn't too bad. It is really important to stay ahead of your work, as Smallberg does not accept late projects. The TAs are very helpful and office hours can ease your mind before submitting a project.

smallberg is by far the nicest prof ive ever had, he's extremely understanding and genuinely cares about his students. projects 3 and 4 take some time but overall the class is super easy. homeworks projects and tests are all very easy, the medians were always high 90s. bless david i hope his pillow is always cold at night <3

Smallberg is probably one of the smartest professors in the country. He knows every detail of C++ all the way through and can literally recite lines from the documentation. Taking CS32 with him gives a huge boost to any student because of the amount of detail and nuance that Smallberg approaches his class with. This class is hands down one of the most valuable experiences for any student in CS.

A lot of these reviews don't tell you about how this class is. Truth is, Smallberg is an insanely intelligent dude. He knows C++ like it was one of his children(C++ is a Small berg). He sometimes takes a bit to build up the analogies(which can make it slightly monotonous at times and thus hard to concentrate) but when you pay 100% attention, you will realize that no one can explain a complex computing concept like he does. At the same time, this class workload is fucked up. Way too intense way too quickly. And projects, esp 3 and 4, are a massive time crunch. When taking this, take it with 12 units or if more, make sure the rest of your load is not too heavy coz you will have a hard time otherwise(don't be me. 16 stem units including this class and it got so bad that I had to late drop this class)

Smallberg is LOVE
Smallberg is LIFE
Trust me this is the greatest CS course ever
With beautiful project 3 and 4

Both Smallberg and Nachenberg are very good imo. Smallberg's lecture goes more in depth than Nachenberg's, but covers less topics/breadth. It's best if you supplement Smallberg's lectures with Nachenberg's slides.
In our class, we had a total of 5 homework assignments and 4 projects. Every week, we had to turn in 1 or 2 of these assignments. When there's both homework and project due, homework assignments will be shorter (about 3-5hrs), otherwise they take 10-20hrs. Projects take about the same time as homework assignments, but project 3 and 4 are much longer (they're not necessarily harder, just longer assignments).
There are 2 midterms and 1 final exam. In my opinion, exams are much trickier than assignments. Reviewing notes and looking over lecture slides will not be enough, you have to find practice problems for yourself. I did quite well on the homework and projects, but the exams slaughtered my GPA.

I enrolled in Carey's section for CS 32, but due to the course being online, I had access to Smallberg's lecture videos (that he prepared ahead of time). Smallberg presented the material extremely clearly and was especially thorough in his explanations of important C++ concepts. It's clear he knows C++ more than Carey, although both are phenomenal CS 32 professors. He includes some additional info about the history of C++ language features that I personally found interesting, although it is not tested on his exams. He is very nice when it comes to answering student questions and definitely not unapproachable like some of the previous reviews mentioned.

Grading for the class is painstakingly slow, although Smallberg is working hard to get scores out to students as soon as possible. I feel CS 32 projects, particularly the last two, take a ton of time to test thoroughly and it is pretty much impossible to design an automated grading script.

I really hope Smallberg's rating goes up! By the way, Carey has mentioned how hard Smallberg has worked. For project 4, he spent a ton of time designing skeleton code for Windows, Mac, and Linux machines and posted updates to the spec at literally 4 in the morning (and no, Smallberg did not set a timer for 4 in the morning!). While previous reviewers mentioned how slow the grading has been, I feel that the heavy workload of CS 32 makes grading assignments inevitably time consuming. As frustrated as I am with not knowing scores to the last two projects, both midterms, and the final, I am confident that Smallberg is working hard to get those scores back soon.

Edit: Smallberg's rating is now 4.0 for CS 32 :)

Edit (again): I got an A+ in CS 32!

I suspect most people reading the reviews are trying to decide between Nachenberg and Smallberg for CS32. Keep in mind, you can really just go to whatever lecture you want regardless of what professor you have (though this was easier due to it being remote and lecture halls not filling up).
Due to it being remote, I went to both for the first few weeks and ended up just watching Smallberg's recorded lectures on my own time in the second half of the quarter.
While both professors cover largely the same material, going to both, there were definitely times where some subjects were better emphasized in one class over another. Keep in mind Smallberg writes the tests, so for Midterm 2 for this quarter, a decent amount of people from Nachenberg's class ended up being super confused on the first question because it wasn't really focused on in Nachenberg's class. On the flip side, Nachenberg would often try to relate topics to more applications (which you can see in his slides describing Huffman encoding). Also, graph algorithms were basically not touched on at all my Smallberg this quarter (though to be fair I think Nachenberg only covered it for like half a lecture).
If you plan on tending all the lectures live anyways, Nachenberg's lectures would often be filled with interactive activities, games, and guest speakers to break up the 2 hour long lectures. However, this is less helpful if you plan on watching them on your own time.
Smallberg often tries to give the rationale behind C++ design features, which I found helpful in understanding the topics.
Also, because Nachenberg designs the projects, Smallberg didn't always know how to answer specific project-based questions off the top of his head.

For CS32 in general, I personally didn't think it was that hard (I may regret saying this once grades come out), but Project 3 and 4 both took ~30 hours, mostly due to debugging. Since they're both near the end of the quarter, you should probably avoid having too many other classes you suspect will take a lot of time near the end. Project 3 was long, but we were given like 2 weeks so it wasn't too bad if you managed to spread out you workload. Project 4 was shorter, but much more technically difficult and involved a lot of debugging. There was a lot less time to work on it as well.

Grading has been slow for tests, but that is justifiable due to the sheer number of students. But that can be frustrating going into midterms/finals with no gauge of how well you've been doing.

Overall, more interesting class than CS31. If you take Smallberg you'll probably be fine and you can always review using Nachenberg's slides if you need to.

Terrifying workload, and legendary Smallberg, writing this down when I am doing the homework with tears.

lit class