Love Bruce!! Super nice with grades and gave us an extra credit quiz worth 30 points. Can tell he is really passionate about computer science and tries really hard to help with all questions that come up. Something new for this quarter was that our 7th project was a open-ended design your own type project which I thought was really nice (adding on to/based on project 6). Overall a super nice professor and would definitely recommend taking CS31 with him over any other professor.
Also discussions aren't mandatory but I would recommend doing the optional worksheets as they are really useful in solidifying your understanding of the concepts.

Professor Huang is a great professor and I would highly recommend taking his course. Throughout the quarter, it was very clear to me that he cares a lot about teaching and the quality of the content that he puts out. His lectures and slides are easy to understand and he's extremely accommodating and willing to help out his students. In addition, there were a ton of useful resources available. In terms of how the course was constructed, the exams and projects were fair and the course ran smoothly!

Huang's an energetic professor who explains things well and evidently cares a lot about his students. He was super understanding with misunderstandings in CCLE and would do his best to clarify things through email or on Piazza. Would recommend if he teaches again

If you have no prior coding experience, I would suggest not to take CS 31 with Huang if you have any other options. I took him for winter, but had to drop week 9 because I had no fucking clue what was going on in class. He stutters a lot and can barely get out a coherent sentence. He's difficult to understand and he often leaves out little details that would make the material easier to understand. He's a bit all over the place. As I write this, I'm currently taking CS 31 with Stahl over the summer and he has been great. 10x better than Huang. Anyway, Huang just isn't a great lecturer. You can tell he likes teaching the class and is passionate about CS in general, but he just isn't an effective lecturer.

Okay so as someone who has done a year of high school coding Java this class was cake. It was a bit of a learning curve with C++ but they are very similar. I barely had to attend lectures/discussions except for in the beginning. However, I agree with another review I saw that if you have never coded before Huang is a little challenging. I would definitely utilize discussion time as mine was pretty much 2 hours of office hours. You can get plenty of help in this class especially since piazza is available and people respond super quick. Huang also realized people were struggling with grades at some point and added extra credit quizzes and extra points to the final and also moved our midterm online bc we wanted it to be. He cares a lot about cs and his students just really make sure u attend lectures and utilize discussions and piazza for project help if you have never coded before!

Listen, if you don't have coding experience do not take this class. All the good things you're hearing about Huang are from people who already know how to code. I have never coded before and Huang made this class so unnecessarily stressful and difficult. His lectures were extremely boring, hard to follow, and plain unhelpful. He clearly did not know how to teach coding at a beginner level. His tests aren't hard but he doesn't teach well enough for the content that is on them. The midterm was taken during week 4 or 5 and wasn't graded until week NINE. And even then some people's tests weren't even fully graded. I got a C- on the midterm which was around the average which was so nerve wracking and stressful since the final was two weeks later. Luckily he offered an extra credit quiz for up to 12 points on the midterm which alleviated some stress. The only reason I ended with an A is because we were allowed a cheat sheet on the final and I had exactly what was on the final and exactly an all-or-nothing 10 point extra credit question written on my cheat sheet so I ended up getting a 102 on the final. As for projects, his specs are actually TERRIBLE. He is so bad at explaining what he wants which results in the project averages to sometime be in the 70s and 80s. But again, if you have done programming before you will get an A, but if not it will be unnecessarily stressful.

i took this class as a non-STEM major so take this review with a grain of salt. Professor Huang is a great person, but he sucks at lecturing. what i mean is that he is very accommodating to students' opinions but most of the time, i feel like i am self-studying for the projects and exams. but i do think that's how it should be at UCLA regardless of what class you're taking. the TA's and LA's weren't that great either because i would ask them a couple questions regarding code and they would reply with a generic answer. overall, a pretty mid experience with this class.

This class was a joke, two lectures form 4-5:50 on Monday and Wednesday where he would sit in the front of the class and talk without a microphone to 150+ ppl(the first week there were like 200-250 ppl). If you were sat anywhere behind the 7/8th row, you had no chance of following the lecture. Lecture was not very useful but he uploaded videos that clarified the concepts on bruin learn. I have to add that this class only has one midterm that is 25% of your grade (that we took week 4) so if you do badly on that you're cooked. It's standard in the COM SCI department (i think?- most professors do it anyway) that your project score is capped by the mean of the midterm and final +30 points (so if you get a 50 and a 60, your project score is out of 75% not 100%), but having one midterm really screwed me over. I got a 90 on the final and a 98 on the projects (which imo where WAY easier than they should have been), but I hadn't quite grasped the concepts of project 3 when we did the midterm (midterm was on Wednesday and project 3 was due on saturday) so I went in and bombed it because 40% of our grade was about loops. I got a 40% on my midterm (it was graded week 8). This was obviously my own fault but I felt like they were grading unecessarily harshly. Also it was online so there was definitely cheating (it was on respondus lockdown browser though). He did give us an extra credit quiz which increased our grade by 12%. I got an extra 8.6% because of it, which was the difference between a C+ and a B- for me and I am very glad he did that. But he made it seem as tho u were guaranteed a 100% if you did it and it was definitely not like that. It was easy enough though. Overall, I think you should take another proffeser but if you gotta take Huang, just keep in mind that you're going to have to put in a lot of outside effort (W3schools, LearnCpp and I recommend C++ for beginners by Dr Kung-Hua Chang (this book SAVED me for the final)). He was really helpful during OH and piazza was really helpful (although some of the student's questions confused me more than helped me), and also my TA and LA were great.

This class was okay. I've taken APCSA and had a very good understanding of that material (not much after), and that's pretty similar to about 75% of the course material. If I had done any CS before, however, this class would have definitely been pretty difficult. I feel like my prior coding knowledge and general intuiton and experience in CS carried me through the projects and tests.

There were 6 projects. I'd say the 3rd one was the hardest and even that wasn't too bad. I got 100's on all the projects except for the 5th one where I missed a small edge case, and there were two test cases out of 10 that covered that.

TA's are active on piazza to answer questions. The project specs were mostly okay but a few parts definitely did need clarification, so please ask your questions (even if it's just a clarification)! A couple times just browsing piazza made me realize I interpreted a part of the assignment incorrectly and had to change it.

As for Huang himself, his lectures are all right. Again, since I had cs experience before it wasn't too bad to follow, but I did feel it could be a bit unorganized sometimes, especially when he would switch between several files at once and showing different pieces of code.

There was 1 midterm and 1 final. There was also a 12 point extra credit quiz to be added to your midterm score, and a 10 point EC question on the final (all or nothing). On the midterm, there were 2 MCQ's graded incorrectly (that they did regrade eventually), and I incorrectly lost 5 points on one of the FRQ's too and had to ask for a regrade, so my actual score was 10 points different than my initial (which is pretty significant and made it pretty stressful). There was ANOTHER grading error on the extra credit quiz which was honestly a little frustrating. In the end they did take care of regrades so it was all good, but it definitely added some unneccessary stress to the class.

The codewriting parts of the exams were probably pretty fair. The mcqs were mostly okay too but there were a few trick questions so read them carefully. I don't have too much of an opinion in this class. I did well but I wouldn't exaclty say I really enjoyed it too much? It was fine overall.

This class is pretty chill, and there were only 6 projects for us this quarter. However, Professor Huang is a pretty bad lecturer and honestly a lot of his lectures just consist of him showing us code and playing around with it but not really making any conclusions or points about what he is doing. However, the tests were generally fair and he does give pretty generous extra credit to add to both your midterm and final exam grades. I think I (hopefully) ended with an A with no real prior coding experience. The one main flaw of this class, however, is that it is quite unorganized, unclear, and project specs are quite confusing. Huang's TAs are also not too useful and are really slow with responding to emails, at least in my experience. If you want a nice, smooth introduction to C++ or Comp Sci in general I would advise against this class and try taking Stahl or Smallberg instead. They seem like much better lecturers.