Honestly this is a pretty typical CS elective. We go over a good amount of material, and it’s not always taught the best but you still end up learning at least a few useful things. It’s nice that Rosario makes some kind of effort to keep the class modern: he completely rewrote our first project to use Python and Postgres instead of PHP and MySQL, and while I didn’t find our second project very interesting, we still got good exposure to some pretty important tech for data science. They could’ve been better (especially project 2, which had a good amount of probably unnecessary hiccups). The homework’s are kind of bad, they’re kind of too wordy and not clear, but thankfully it’s all graded on completion, and you’ll still get something out of them at least.

For his lectures there’s definitely a whole lot of content. It’s a bit better if you actually go to class since he kind of breezes over some of the stuff that he realizes he won’t have time to cover. It’s definitely and can be hard to focus for an 8am, but usually after asking a few questions I was able to come out of lecture understanding most of the stuff. A lot of the topics did have me dozing off, but databases isn’t the most interesting topic in general. I liked how he kept his material modern, even if he didn’t cover NoSQL stuff very well it’s still good to hear it mentioned, and he also had some nice materials on streams and distributed big data type stuff.

Lastly, I’m not sure what’s up with the overwhelmingly negative reviews? I’ve never actually talked to anyone who hates this class as much as these people seem to do. Additionally there’s a lot of really strange personal attacks on a guy that clearly means well but just isn’t a great teacher. And it seems that all those same people are downvoting any reviews that are positive in any way (I’m sure they’ll come for this one too!). Really just seems like one friend group who for some reason felt personally wronged by the professor. The class isn’t great but it’s overall fine, and the stuff you learn is really valuable, especially if you’ve never had exposure to it before. I recommend it especially cuz it doesn’t seem like 143 has any other good professors anymore.

I started out the quarter really looking forward to what Professor Rosario had in store for CS 143 because of his modern approach and industry experience, but ended up disliking him and my life while taking this class.

Projects:

Credit to him here, the projects are practical and interesting. The 2nd project is fairly vague but doable if you start early.

Tests:

He wanted to be like Eggert but honestly he couldn't. Eggert at least gives somewhat fair tests, Rosario's tests were the biggest load of BS. Especially the final, a huge test where he handpicked the most random stuff out of his lecture slides and made it a large portion of the test. The final was the one of the hardest tests I've taken here at UCLA and it felt like he made the test unnecessarily hard.

Piazza:

He seems like an okay guy in person, but he can be seriously mean to students asking FAIR questions online. I wasn't even a victim of this but monitored Piazza frequently and it felt like he was going on some weird power trip.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend him for 143, it's not the worth the stress and the hassle. This is the first time I've felt compelled enough to write a BruinWalk review about a professor. He's clearly a smart guy but out to get students to fail his tests.

Professor was honestly the worst I've had in UCLA. This is not supposed to be a hard CS class, it was supposed to be a useful CS elective. BUT HOLY COW THE FINAL WAS MOST DUMB TEST IVE EVER TAKEN. GDI i feel like I learned nothing, but I use all the stuff I learned in the class at work (and I know what I'm doing). The test did not test my understanding of the material at all, it was a test to see who can regurgitate most bs possible. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS. (honestly you can learn postgres, relational algebra, and stream by yourself with youtube WAY BETTERTHAN ROSARIO).

I was recommended this class specifically with this professor because he was supposed to be "amazing". This couldn't be any further from the truth. He has roughly 100 slides a lecture to go through at 8 AM in the morning. The slides are actually dense and whenever he was asked to explain something he always had no clue how any technical stuff really worked. Seems absolutely incompetent in any theoretical concepts to the point where he had to "get mad" and just move one due to his lack of knowledge. His homework and projects were fairly reasonable but were exceptionally vague. Anything you would ask on piazza would always receive a ridiculously sarcastic and demeaning reply. Never have I seen this much god damn toxicity in a piazza forum in finals week. His midterm is exceptionally long for the time given to us. The final was absolutely absurd. It seems like he just sat there the night before the final and specifically chose the topics that he said weren't going to be on the final or was incapable of being able to explain during lecture and designed a test around those concepts. Is he a good person in normal life...who knows? All I know is he needs to change how he goes about his teaching or just stay in industry.

TL;DR Rosario has industry experience, so that's a plus. But that comes with quite a bit of arrogance, inconsistency, and poor awareness. There's been some enjoyable lectures, and I've had worse professors. Rosario has a ways to improve, but for now, learning doesn't correlate to getting a good grade, so taking R-cubed may be more pain than it's worth.
--------
The class is weird. "R-cubed" is a friendly professor, but looking back, his class was not very useful. His lectures were not very relevant nor helpful. and he penalized students for not attending. I scored 2 stddev above median in midterm and fully expected an A in the class, but somehow scored below the median on the final, due to some very very strange questions that I could only assume were lecture-only.

He also has a poor attitude on Piazza, even referring to students as "entitled" when they ask for clarifications on his very confusing projects and examinations. He doesn't seem to recognize how his comments could be detrimental to mental health during the stress-packed finals week. He tries to be helpful, but is a flawed human with a lack of self-awareness in educating.

To his credit, he is a newer professor who's been in industry a lot, and I appreciate that he has such high standards for his students. I would be wary about taking his class, but it's pretty good if you're self-reliant and don't mind inconsistent grading.