I take 35L with Dalmia Shivam, he is a nice guy. HOWEVER, I have to say, Aditya Joglekar and Aaron Zhou basically fucked up this quarter. As everyone know, each TA is in charge of an assignment per week. Aditya takes Assignment 4 which is due on week 5 's Monday. And he takes the entire quarter to grade it, which the grades comes out even after assign9 just 5 days before grades finalized in 12/23. Aaron Zhou was in charge of assignment 9 which is a brand new one. Everyone was busying on finals, and he decided to give only 20% on lab(easier part), and impossible-task homework(hard part) 80%. Don't believe it's Eggert decision. NO! It's TA 's choice that they don't want you to pass at least they want you to suffer. They don't fking care students, if they are still TA for the next quarter, watch out the assignments they take charge of cuz they are b_tches.

If I had known about Eggert before coming to UCLA, I wouldn't have come to UCLA.

I had a great TA (Zhaowei the GOAT), but still got absolutely assfucked by this class. Here are some tips for you so that you don't have the same shit ass experience I did:
Step 1: Don't take the class
Step 2: If you have to take it, get really familiar with the material from the first four assignments before week 1 so you have a crazy good advantage.
Tough it out for the first 4 weeks and you'll be good in terms of managing workload. The final was a straight clap, no amount of studying could have prepared me for that bullshit. Sure, I learnt a lot, but this class is broken.

Class is difficult and takes up more time than any previous class but is somewhat manageable. Class is graded on a curve and the average grade is around a B+ (maybe B or A-). This class teaches you a lot and gets you up to speed with actual software development.

To anyone confused about previous years' reviews, CS35L used to have lectures given by TAs instead of Eggert and more homeworks, and was much more difficult and chaotic. If you want more relevant reviews, take a look at CS97 from Spring 2020 onward, which was like the beta to the current 35L.

The main topics covered were Emacs (text editor), Unix, Shell/Bash Scripting, Lisp, Python, C, and Git. React and JavaScript were briefly covered in a lecture but were essential for one assignment and the entire final project. If you've never used React, knowing a little HTML/CSS/JS will help a lot.

Lectures/Homeworks: Eggert's lectures are a lot more theoretical and only cover a little syntax. You need to look up a lot of stuff for homeworks and teach yourself but you’ll learn a lot. Lectures are pretty interesting and I enjoyed them. The late penalty is pretty generous (only 1% off for 1 day late. 2^(N-1)% off for N days late). 3 or more (outta 6) of the homeworks were given extended deadlines. Homeworks can take up many hours.

Midterm and final are difficult and much different to traditional tests. You can't really study for them that much except for doing the practice tests. Many questions are open-ended and require you to understand instead of regurgitate. Some questions are pretty obscure/random. The tests are unlimited open-note, but extremely detailed notes on lectures only help on getting maybe an extra 5%. And don't leave any question blank. You will get some partial credit even if it's completely wrong.

For the final project, most people make a web app with React. Getting a good group where everyone does their fair share is crucial to not spending too much time on it. Your group presents to a discussion at the end of week 10. The project was graded generously (most got 90%-100%). And you get something to put on your resume

Like other comments stated here, this course is a pain in the ass even though the content is useful. It's disorganized. The workload is so heavy that few materials can be covered during the lab. So, you have to study most of the content by yourself. The final has 26 pages and Prof. Eggert claims it's a 3-hour exam. Some TAs are very harsh on grading, and they take a lot of points off just because you are wrong in one question or you don't include something that is not even asked for in the assignment instructions. Many TAs don't even provide any feedback for your grade unless you ask for it. If you have to take this course, I would recommend you start to study the content, such as python and bash, before the quarter you are gonna take the course. One more thing, some people may be smart enough to be a very good graduate student, but they may not be competent to be a TA, and this is a TA based course. So, be cautious.

WORST OF ALL TIME

I'm prepared for heavy assignments and difficult tests on things he barely lectured in class. However, what I want to tell people right now is his unreasonable, mysterious curve and final grading strategy. The final grading is messy, with some people curved down but some not, just because he thought we would take benefits from generous graders in assignments. He didn't even tell which portion of the class was curved down and how, nor did he seem to consider that some answers might just be good enough to receive a full grade from any grader. It has NO transparency at all. You never know if you would be mysteriously curved down at the deadline of final grade submission day, and you can do nothing about it (since he will also not expose how he did it). I got full grades for every assignment, but if I knew those grades does not reflect anything, I would consider P/NP instead of getting this shitty grade that ruins my GPA (never got a B before).

In a nutshell, he is not the type of professor we usually met that gives you a hard time during the quarter but curve up at the end to make students learn. He is the devil that gives people a hard time till the moment you get your final grade. I don't know how curving down without clear explanation benefits learning, and he might not care.

This class need a complete reform. It is not professor Eggert's fault but someone in CS department have to do something with it. Once again, everything in this class is a disaster and need a complete reform. Materials in the syllabus are useful but they are so poorly taught that we would rather study the same thing on our own during summer holiday.

Exams are more of creative writing questions rather than coding questions. One example question would be like "If you were to redesign system A on top of framework B, what's the pros and cons", at which point you can only freestyle write if you don't have the pros and cons of each system in your notes. Midterm had a mean and median around 63/100, final had a mean and median around 70/100, and yet still no curves on the final grades. I got 1 point above the average for midterm and about 82/100 for the final and got a B+. The whole class is appalled that no curves were given to such a low grade distribution. One TA said that past GPA distribution is around 2.7 for this class. It's pretty accurate. Don't be misled by the beautiful grade distribution of 2020 spring on Bruinwalk

This class is going to change your life, but not in a good way. CS 35L is basically a lower division capstone project, and takes up so much of your time. DO NOT take other challenging courses in the same quarter unless you're already familiar with Emacs, Git and a few programming languages.

By change your life, I mean that you will change all your schedules to work around Eggert. Your holidays and free time will be spent working on his homework or project. Say goodbye to a normal study schedule as assignments will probably take longer than you need.

I actually liked Eggert's lectures and he covered some interesting concepts (would be a great guest lecturer). However, it is so out of sync with the homework and project that you will find yourself thinking that the class is broken (I did several times). You have to remember that his lectures are more or less independent of the rest of the class. If the assignment involves coding in Python, don't wait for his Python lecture before starting. Use TA notes and your own knowledge to start projects ASAP, as that's the only way to not fall behind.

The group project at the end is about programming a web app from scratch, which is actually pretty fun if you have a good team. You are free to choose whatever idea and technology stack works for you, and there are lots of tutorials available as needed.

Eggert's exams though... if you have a mindset of aiming to get 100%, it's time to let that go. He makes his exams extremely challenging and long, and a lot of it is computer science theory (meaning answers are paragraphs and it almost seems like a philosophy exam). While you will almost definitely be depressed with your exam scores, remember that Eggert wants a bell curve and tries to use it as needed.

Best of luck, you'll need it

As the last batch of this class, I find it to be my responsibility to pass on the information of this course to the lurkers who wish to find out what this class was and learn more about the prologue of what is now CS 97.
Quite contrary to many of the other reviewers, I... liked this class. As someone who didn't know CS terminologies and tools out of the box, like git, bash, text editors, etc, I find this to bring me up to speed with what a lot of people come into college knowing in CS.
I did the projects 100% on my own, and it was worth it. I learned so much from this course. Yes the topics were split up by week, completely different from the other so it seemed quite disorganized, but as Professor Eggert would put it, this class is to help you learn how to learn. In that respect, this class achieved the objective.
The final was 50% of the grade which sucked but it's a great excuse to make sure that you know your stuff well when you exit the class. Because, well, CS 111 will kick your ass harder if you don't know stuff from this one.
The course was also a stage for Professor Eggert to flex about his Emacs contributions and GNU Linux contributions. You'll see his name on the command line more than you'll ever see it in class (it is TA-led, after all) and half of the answers to the assignment questions had his name popping around somewhere or the other.
Well, I must say that there are two reasons that this class was significantly more mangeable and merrier than previous batches. Primarily, we had an autograder, so we kinda knew our scores on submitting and could ask TAs on and off about which test cases we weren't hitting. Secondly, it was online, so the final exam format was that you have the internet and the servers to your disposal when attempting the exam, and you're kinda expected to use it.

Shoutout to Madhu the TA for being awesome in this quarter.

Well, not like this course will be offered again so, adios. Hope you ace CS 97, or whatever CS class that might be the standard software construction lab in the future.