Ok so this is probably an unpopular opinion but I didn't find 131 to be as tough as people make it out to be. Yes it's still hard. Yes I still struggled. And I'm surprised I got an A (was honestly expecting a B+) so hear me out:

I took CS33 with him and that was an absolute madhouse so I was prepared for 131 to be so much worse but was surprised when it wasn't. I actually understood what he was talking about for like 70% of lectures and the stuff that I didn't get I would go online and read articles, watch YouTube, and go through the textbook to make sense of it. If you go into the class with the mindset of being ready to work hard, you will learn a lot in this class. The textbook was really helpful to read (it doesn't cover everything though) but it's a good way to gain a simple understanding of material if you have no idea what's happening.

The TAs are all super good and super active on piazza and also had hint code on github for us to refer to (tbh it wasn't that helpful after the first homework). Homeworks 2 and 5 (Scheme) were the hardest imo. It's difficult conceptually to wrap your head around let alone code yourself so be prepared to be super frustrated with these. Homeworks 3 and 6 were the easiest and took like 2 and 4 hours respectively. It's really important that you put in effort for the project report and HW6 because these are more conceptual and high level and are more than likely to be tested.

Also, I took 111 with Harry Xu before 131 and I think that helped me out a little bit because I had the analytical skills of weighing pros/cons that you do a lot in 111.

Tests are open notes like usual and our midterm average was like 70% which is ridiculously high for an Eggert test and most people thought that this midterm was easy. It definitely felt more straightforward and the questions weren't as convoluted as usual. The final was online because of the whole COVID-19 situation and the average was bout 65% which is again, super high but we had open internet access and 24 hours to do the test.

Unpopular opinion: Eggert is one of the best professors at UCLA. His lectures are incredibly engaging and the subject material is interesting. You learn a lot about a bunch of things related to programming languages. This may have been the most interesting CS class I've taken here. There are also practical aspects through the projects. Maybe Prolog isn't that useful but you do a lot of functional programming and go over asynchronous programming and multi threading. These are all extremely useful. Projects range in difficulty. The OCaml project on parsing a grammer is impossible, I think I turned it in a week late. The Java project is okay but a little obnoxious. Every other project is straightforward and fun. I actually found the Lisp project the most fun (but I'm sure a lot of people won't). There's a paper due at the end of the class where you have to talk about a modern programming language. This paper is very easy and depending on how much effort you put into it you could maybe learn something that will help you. We had Kotlin as our language for our paper, which is nice because it can be used practically. The tests had a lot more coding than an average Eggert class. Our first midterm was 3/5s writing functional programs. These kind of tests are a lot more fair and the projects do help.

Don't get me wrong, this class is hard and you will have to put effort in it. But this is the best and fairest class I've taken from Eggert and one of the best Upper Divs at UCLA.

If you actually do the readings, this class will be a lot of work. I read all the assigned A.D readings and additional readings and did most of the S.K. readings (all of those before the midterm and chapter 11). The discussions are very helpful and my TA was very helpful in telling us how to approach the project and often times gave us pseudo or actual code to implement the project. The projects are relatively time consuming but for the most part aren't super difficult.

I got 80% on one of the projects but over 90/100 on all the other projects. I got a 49.5% on the midterm after a regrade(mean was 49.5% and median was 51%). The TA's grade the report at the end and don't seem to care much so I got 100 on it even though I completely rewrote it the day it was due in like an hour. The final was open book and open note so I had a whole binder with a table of contents that really helped in the final which I got a 77% on and ended up with an A overall in the class.

I definitely suggest going to his office hours to clarify on concepts in readings/in class because he is really good at explaining in smaller settings and is a really nice person, so don't be intimidated!

The projects are moderately hard. The midterm and final are ridiculously hard. Open book and open notes will help you little. If you want your effort to be paid off reasonably, avoid him at all costs.

Leave now!!
Wrote with blood and tear.

Unless you feel like you are smarter than 99% of your classmates.

I'll preface this by saying that I'm a mediocre CS student who scheduled his quarter to very generously accommodate this class' reputation as a hard class with a hard professor. I came in wanting to really learn this well, and I'm sitting at week 9 with an almost guaranteed drop (just waiting on my MT2 score) and feeling like I learned nothing of use.

Eggert is a brilliant man. He's a good speaker too, and manages to make the dry topic of assembly code and low-level computer architecture interesting. That being said, this class is one of my biggest regrets at UCLA. The expectations are unreasonable and the class is organized pretty horribly. He expects students to read the entirety of the over 1000-page textbook, and lectures are incredibly difficult to understand without it. They're pretty hard to understand even with the readings.

The homeworks and labs honestly shouldn't be incredibly hard. The problem is they're filled with bugs and issues. Instead of giving you the files that you need and then having you work through the assembly code, he gives you files that you need to configure, unzip from tarball, patch, or otherwise modify, often inside the linux servers, which he assumes you are completely fluent in using. This wouldn't be a big issue if they could just tell you what to do and why you're doing it, but the spec instructions are always incomplete. Ask the same question on piazza 7 times and you'll get 7 different answers, so your best bet is sitting in TA office hours for countless hours until your assignments are configured properly. If your TAs don't constantly decide to move their office hours, sometimes cancelling or moving them on piazza only after a student posts that they went to office hours and no one was there. But I felt like I was so bogged down in the trivial garbage of setting things up properly that I couldn't properly learn. Giving more assignments but cutting out the setup or giving Smallberg-style detailed instructions instead of a 1-page spec with 1000 missing steps would help tremendously with the learning in this class.

Late policy is generous, being 2^(n-1) percent loss for n days late. But because so many students get high scores on the labs (often through cheating, which even the TAs almost encourage, or through crowding office hours, which makes it impossible to get your questions answered), you can't afford to lose that many points on labs at all. Start early, because every step of every assignment will have unreasonable and unexpected errors... even if you use online solutions.

Tests are literally the most depressing thing you'll ever experience. Eggert makes his tests on the fly. They're good tests for the A students, but if you're not an A student, it'll leave you feeling hopeless. They're tangentially related to the course content but I definitely felt tremendously underprepared for them. Review sessions and discussions seemed to reinforce the material, but nothing could save me from the tests (even actually knowing the material, which I did on occasion). Maybe if you're good at BSing you can get on top of the curve. But if not, you're in for a rough time.

Overall, I thought the course was a pretty terrible experience. I learned quite little, was overwhelmed almost all the time, ran into 10000 bugs every time I tried to turn something in, and didn't get enough of a chance to apply the content to assignments. I have a lot of respect for Eggert's brilliance, but if you want a good learning experience and your sanity, take it with anyone else.

宝儿作为在职的软件工程师 讲他做喜欢的软件工程（不是计算机科学）
看得出来满腔热情
思路很快 得保持全神贯注
能学到很多

Overall this class was definitely very useful towards learning about various aspects of computer science in terms of software development. Eggert was very engaging and the class wasn't as bad as I had initially thought (though the class was probably revamped and being a Sophomore helped as I had previous knowledge before coming in). Eggert is an amazing lecturer and the TAs were nice as well. The assignments were a bit difficult so they definitely took a lot of time to complete. For tests there is a wide variety of subjects tested on so it benefits to really understand how higher level concepts work as well as how to program in the ways taught during lecture.

Honestly after taking 35L and 111 with Eggert I thought it couldn't get any worse but it does. This is hands down the most useless class I've ever been apart of. The amount of work involved with it is absolutely insane(much more than his 111 IMO), and his "late policy" is just his way of assigning more work than can be done in class.

For the Prolog section, he started going over the language the day the homework was due. Python project is due in less than 48 hours and he hasn't spoken about Python of TCP once haha. It's absolute madness. They need to rework this entire class. Remove one of the OCAML homeworks and maybe you could have a decent schedule.

This class is way too easy. We typically spend less than 1 hour per week on projects, and attending the lecture is somewhat optional. I just hope the exams can become harder to keep us understanding this course well. Eggert's class usually great and recommend this class for gpa boosters. 5/5