With all due respect, the TAs carry this class. Everything from assignments to assignment hints to the project to exam grading to piazza posts are handled by the TAs. Daniel Meirovitch is the GOAT TA.

Professor only shows up in lectures and during his office hours. Even though he is very knowledgeable about most of the topics, his lectures are disorganized and there is no flow of topics. He jumps from Lisp to HTML to C/gdb abruptly. The lectures provide little to no preparation for the assignments and the project, all the help came from discussion and Daniel's tips videos. And not to mention the fact that all lectures are typed out on Emacs which gets super boring and unintuitive. He isn't on Piazza to answer any student doubts, which is highly irresponsible in my opinion, and takes days to reply to emails.

The midterm and final don't really test you on your understanding of the material but how many (sometimes vague) questions you can write an answer to in the allotted time. It's sad to see that a subject as important as software construction is neglected as badly as this by Eggert.

The other reviews are right. This class is a LOT of work. Labs are difficult. Lectures do not go over how to do them. You have to figure out a lot of it yourself (lots of googling). Discussions are also helpful, depending on your TA, with some good hints. Exams are also very hard, that's how Eggert exams are. Open book/notes, but somewhat more difficult conceptually (combine 2 ideas, pros and cons of a hypothetical program to create, etc), as well as some coding problems. Open notes helps, but not much. You need a good understanding of the material to succeed. Grading was very slow this quarter, we didn't have grades on any of the 6 assignments until after the final :/. Very untransparent, which was frustrating. All that being said, this class was VERY helpful. Eggert is a great lecturer, and incredibly smart. He definitely knows what he's talking about (ex: he coded part of emacs, which you use in this class). It's certainly difficult, and labs can be quite tedious, especially because his lectures just discuss the concepts/background of what you're doing, and you have to figure out the syntax/process. But I definitely am thankful I had this class, I learned a LOT. Might be an unpopular opinion, but I intend to take more classes with him (at least 131). You learn a lot in this class, and its a very valuable experience, potentially at the cost of a slightly lower GPA.

It's hard. The midterm was already difficult, and then the final took it to another level. One of the questions could legitimately be a Scheme homework assignment. Generally speaking, there are three types of exam questions:

- Rote: Implementing a simple function, drawing syntax diagrams, etc. This is as close to free points as you're gonna get, so I try to do these first.
- Discussion: I save them for last since they're pretty easy to BS. On the flip side, the TA's will often have a random reason to dock points.
- Cool stuff: Occasionally there will be a question that is like a logic puzzle. The answer was not discussed in class exactly, but you can arrive at it with a solid understanding of the course material. Probably where people lose most points.

Overall, there is no difference between remote and non-remote Eggert exams; they're still timed and he still writes them the day before.

On the other hand, the homeworks are extremely fair. The spec contains a lot of test cases, and if you pass all of them you're almost certainly going to score perfectly. Not to mention the exponential decay penalty for late submission :chef_kiss:

He clearly doesn't care about how COVID-19 will affect some of the students. All the family shit, inconvenience or fairness cannot be compared with the joy from torturing students. Dr. Eggert is an extremely caring professor and, I sincerely love this course. I love CS but this class is just disgusting.

This is my fourth time taking this class. Yep, you read that correctly: 4 times. To be sure, however, I wouldn't exactly say I really took this class until this past quarter. That is because all previous times, I would get psyched out upon looking at the first assignment, procrastinate, think 'oh this prof has a nice late policy' (2^n points off for n days late), and then boom, the late policy would creep up on me, and I would never get the assignment done.

Which brings me to advice on how I got an A in this class, after 2 withdrawals and an F: Treat this class as your absolute number 1 priority.

This class is extremely tough. With the addition of the project (in which you design a web application), this class is essentially a 'lower-division capstone'. You should not expect Eggert to cover what is needed for each assignment and you especially should not expect him to really cover anything needed for your project. For example, we didn't even really cover Git (which is absolutely essential for the group project) until around week 7 I think. And if you waited until week 7 to start your project, well that just isn't a good idea.

You should start all of the assignments as soon as they're released. Do not wait for Eggert to go over everything needed for it, because he won't. The lectures serve as high-level explanations of software construction, and while he uses the assignment topics as kind of guidelines for him to go over various topics of software construction (i.e. Git for version control), he won't go into specifics. It is up to you (and hopefully the TAs' hints video if they keep doing them) to figure out what the hell to do, probably with a couple of visits to office hours. Eggert is very strong on learn-by-doing.

Another thing to be prepared for are Eggert's exams. They are absolutely terrifying. It is quite possible that you will not really know how to do any of it. That being said, you need to realize that everyone is probably on the same level as you, and so everyone will get around 50% most likely (as that is the score that Eggert aims for, because he 'likes a nice bell curve'). In other words, don't freak out too hard on the exam. Just get as much down as you possibly can.

And finally on the final project: Your group will pretty much be on your own. Finding a group that is around the same skill level as you is most definitely the way to go also, as going with the CS gods who have been coding since the womb will probably just give you some intense imposter syndrome, and you really won't learn anything. Nobody on my team had ever even used any of the languages/technologies we used on our project prior to this course, and we still got a 100 on it. Again, online resources/tutorials are godsend.

Anyways, hope this review helps you all not to make the same mistakes I did 3 times in a row.

(P.S. Emacs > vim)

35L was definitely one of the most unique classes I've taken. Since this class is taught by TAs, everyone's experience seems to be different. Having a good TA is critical to understanding everything in this class, however without any ratings on TAs, it is kind of a wildcard when signing up for the class. Thankfully my TA (Shivam Dalmia) was phenomenal and explained everything thoroughly while also being very helpful with projects. The projects in this class are all over the place with new topics coming up every week. Some projects were extremely tedious like learning Eggert's beloved Emacs in Project 1 and literally logging every single key you press in a text file. Projects varied in difficulty and usefulness overall with most projects just being Eggert flexing some patch he made to Coreutils or another GNU project. Project 9 was new this quarter and took a lot of people by surprise. Overall it wasn't too difficult if you gave it some time, but it seemed kind of pointless dedicating a whole project to digging around the git internals.

The final in this class was interesting to say the least. Eggert (who does not show up until the final) strolled in with a stack of exams that were ridiculously thick (at least twice as long as the practice final that was given out). He prefaced the final by saying that he didn't have time to edit the final which was why it was "a little bit longer than he wanted". This was an understatement. I don't think a single person finished the final and the point distributions of questions were completely off. For example, answering in a few words what a git branch is was equivalent in points to writing an entire Makefile for a C program that you also had to write by hand. If you take this class, be sure to do the easy questions first on the final to maximize your points.

Overall this class was a wild ride, but the material you learn is undoubtedly extremely useful. After 35L, it's amazing how much faster and competently I can work on linux servers and use all of the tools that are provided.

This is definitely a much better version of 35L, you have to do a lot of work, however, the work is super rewarding and you learn a ton. Lectures are super useful comparing with 35L, overall, I think this is a super useful and practical class.

Unclarity. Unclear lectures explaining anything vaguely. Unclear assignment specs that makes you wanna smash the computer. Absolutely ridiculous project that the professor teaches you nothing about, and you have to learn every single bit from online resources.

nothing new, homie Eggert, "interesting" exams, annoying specs, satisfying curves :|

before I took this course, I used to like programming