Get ready to spend countless hours a week on these insane projects, especially the first two. Eggerts lectures are very interesting but often are not remotely useful to the homework until AFTER the assignments are due. Midterm and final are a guessing game of what might be on them, pray that you are able to take this class with Millstein instead.

This was my second class with Prof. Eggert. I took 111 with him and had a similar experience. Prof. Eggert is a world class lecturer. The difficulty of the class comes from the coding assignments and the exams. The medians for the midterm was around 60% and the final was around 50%. This is higher than the usual medians. The issue most students have with the class is that the homeworks, as difficult as they are, do not prepare students for the exams. I think this is correct. Doing well on the homeworks does not imply good performance on the exams. This makes the approach to doing well on Eggert's classes less formulaic. To do well you have to understand the material in lectures and the textbook really well. Take detailed notes on lectures and read the textbook. The text book for this class is wordy and not as good as the 111 textbook, but it is still a good reference. The lectures go into greater depth than the textbook and are more important. Go to office hours of the professor to get help on concepts. Go to TA office hours to get help on assignments. I did not go to discussions because the TAs just spoon feed the homework code. A class this challenging is essential to a rigorous computer science education and for developing your intuitive ability. Eggert's goal, in his words, is to "test your intution". Therefore he makes his exams open ended (not really) and really pushes you to reason based on the information you learnt in class and from readings. Regurgitation of notes/readings will not help. All the people who complain aren't interested in maximizing their learning but are more focused on getting good grades. Eggert is incredibly knowledgeable and a treasure of the CS department. I wish we had more classes like this and less classes like that of Prof. Reinman's.
The few criticisms I have are that I thought that the typed reports (homeworks 3 and 6) were not necessary. I didn't learn that much from writing a 5 pg. reports. The TAs also don't provide detailed feedback on them.
The students who usually like Eggert are students who code a lot outside class and like coding.

Yes, it's hard, but Eggert is a great lecturer and the content is good. One of the best CS classes here overall

All I gotta say is, it is a goddamn miracle that I passed this class.

That is all.

Pretty much like all the other reviews have already said.

Don't take this class, but obviously you have to take it so take it. You'll get through it fine.

Bad. I don't know what I learned and I don't know what I'm looking at when he's drawing diagrams. The only good parts of lecture is when he shares his personal anecdotes or is funny. If you've already taken 111, workload-wise this class is not as bad; the projects are way shorter than 111. Taking 161 is also helpful because Lisp is similar to the languages you have to pick up in this class.

This is the most pointless and unreasonably tough courses I have taken at UCLA. You will teach yourself 90% of the material. The projects, with the exception of hw1,hw4, and the project, are all unreasonably difficult and convoluted, and really, nobody knows whats happening and you can bet that tons of students in the course are githubbing most of the hard parts. The exams are written the night before, as stated by the professor, and the averages can wildly vary from 50%-70%. Make sure you read the book and/or review lecture to perform as well as one can on his exams. As usual with eggert you can expect a fat curve at the end but its never consistent so you cant rely on it. FWIW, when I calculated my raw grade with all assignments/exams graded I had a 59.9, and came out with a C .

Honestly people should be pretty prepared for a difficult class whenever it's with Professor Eggert. Projects are time consuming (especially for the second OCaml and the Scheme one). Tests are difficult but something might help for all Eggert tests: they are more about intuitions, so basically whenever you come up with some sort of answer, just write, don't even bother to think too much or too deep about the them. Just let your intuition guide you through would be less confusing and might give better outcomes. Ahhh all that being said I do learn many things in this class and honestly Eggert lectures are good, it's homework and tests that sucks :))

I mean... it's Eggert.
This class is insanely hard, because it's Eggert. The tests are difficult even after watching every lecture, studying, doing the projects, and reading the textbook. That's just how it is. But the curve is great! Midterm and final were both very low averages, but significantly curved, as is classic in Eggert's classes. The lectures focused on the theory behind programming languages in general, as well as the theory behind specific languages (OCaml, Prolog, Java, I'm probably missing one). The projects were much more focused on exploiting specific features of those languages. The final project was non-programming, but rather a comparison of features among a few languages based on what we'd learned in the class. Projects were /insanely/time-consuming if you didn't have help, so start early and set aside a lot of time.
Lectures, as always with Eggert, were engaging and interesting, but kinda hard to follow since they are rarely organized and linear.

[ONLINE QUARTER REVIEW] I got hammered by 35L, so I really wasn't looking forward to this Eggman class. However, I found that I liked the material a lot more and actually kept up with it through the quarter.
- Lifesaver: https://github.com/CS131-TA-team/UCLA_CS131_CodeHelp
- Do the coding assignments yourself, or at the very least, try for a while before succumbing to github. The TA help code above makes doing the assignments by yourself a lot easier than it may have been in previous years. I found that doing the assignments legit made the midterm and final a lot more manageable.
- Eggert is a very captivating lecturer, but you might feel like he rambles a bit (he does). However, he tests on the obscure parts of his lecture. Make sure you have a transcript of all the notes going into the tests.

My biggest criticism of this class is that as soon as you get good at a programming language, you have to switch to a new one. And the scheme project is a complete bitch.