Smallberg yyds

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Professor Smallberg is my god!!!!!

This class was honestly exactly what I expected going in, even though it was a weird quarter. I have taken some CS classes in High School and have a good grasp on object oriented programming.

Smallberg has a gift for delivering the material in a way that is accessible, easy to remember, and informative. He was a really top notch professor.

Projects / Homework:
All of them were unremarkable except,

Project 3 was the most interesting and long project we had. It was a simple RPG using keyboard characters and a dungeon. I didn't finish some recursive function and got -10% but other than that it didn't require much more than some creativity and planning. It was honestly fun and I'm proud of the code I wrote.

Project 4 was tricky but really easy to code once you figured it out. It was an optimization problem where we were graded on how fast our code went. Just paying attention and understanding data types and hash tables was enough to get 100% with less than two days of work. Pay attention in class and don't be afraid to review lectures.

Took this class with Smallberg, and went only to Nachenberg's Lectures. Balled out on Midterm 1 and Final, and got screwed on Midterm 2. Did pretty well on projects + homework, here's my advice:
1) This class isn't necessarily hard, just a massive time sink. Do not take 3 more STEM classes on top of CS 32 if you want to have a life or do things other than school. Expect the first 6 weeks to be a breeze, and the last 4 to be about 10-30 hours of coding a week (depending on how good you are at coding).
2) Projects 3 and 4 are massive time sinks, start them early. 3 on average takes 30-40 hours and 900+ lines of code, 4 takes around 10-20 but is conceptually difficult. The first 2 projects + homework aren't bad, start early though because homework 2-4 can take a bit of time (a few hours).
3) Nachenberg's Lectures aren't concise but they are interesting. Go to them if you want a funny professor, not necessarily an amazing one though. However, Nachenberg's slides (and course reader) are godly, if anything studies them. Smallberg's lectures are also solid, but I would say Nachenberg's slides + Smallberg's lectures are the best combos for this class.
I personally loved this class, and found it way better than CS 31 which felt boring and more like busywork. Plan out early during the class, and it won't be hard.

Smallberg was great. If you've done any coding before this class will be a breeze, even though there's a solid workload. If you haven't taken coding before, take the class in the fall or spring when you won't be stuck in there with all the compsci majors. He moves faster during fall quarter.

Honestly, I really don’t get it. He’s great at explaining concepts but the workload of the class is ridiculous. The grading is abysmally slow; you have no idea what your grade is in the class. If you are like me and just trying to get this pre req out of the way, this class will be a pain. I really don’t understand why the grading is slow because there is like 15 TA’s and to be honest there is automated grading involved for projects and most parts of hw. Furthermore, a lot of projects and hw are reused so I am not really sure why the turn around is ridiculous. I see the class size is rather large, but does it really take that long to the point you have only a third of the material graded by the time you take the final. How is somebody supposed to get real time feedback before testing to prepare. The answer in this class is that you don’t. In terms of communicating, Smallberg is hit or miss. He was pretty hard to communicate via email. I will iterate he does explain concepts well, but you are tested practically; for this reason, Nachenberg slides seem to be more beneficial because ultimately with the amount of time this class consumes its really just a hail mary in the last three weeks of how well you can try to get your head around the things you learn and can do with the time you have. I would say this was a hard class especially if you are introduced to data structures for the first time. You will definitely learn, but you will probably cry a couple times from this class.

Overall: I took AP Computer Science A in high school, so many of the topics weren't new to me, so this class was definitely not hard for me but I can definitely see that it would be more challenging for someone with no prior experience. I took this class online because of COVID, so his lectures were all uploaded beforehand and he spent the actual class time doing Q&A, which I ended up not really going to. His lectures were not super interesting but they are informative and I watched them on 2-4x speed. Overall, Smallberg is very willing to help. I emailed him at midnight one day with a question about my bug, and he answered within 5 minutes with a somewhat passive aggressive but nonetheless helpful answer. He can come off as strict, but he just wants to prepare his students for the future.
Projects: Really weren't too bad; I usually finished them within a day, but start early just in case you run into bugs. Also pay attention to the specific requirements so you don't lose easy points.
Exams: 1 hour, taken online so the exams were all writing code (no code tracing, etc.) which made it pretty easy.

I learned a lot about C++ because of Smallberg. Absolutely legendary in how clear and concise he is. Once I emailed him and his answer was 6 characters long: "FAQ #2". Smallberg's clarity really makes the discussion sections kinda obsolete. Start your projects early. The project specs are pretty clear. In Fall 2020, the tests were just coding and weren't as hard as the coding for the projects, just stay calm. Don't worry about the computer history in the beginning. Would take again.

---Lectures: Smallberg's lectures provided all the necessary information, but they were not always super clear. Lectures were often not super organized and not very engaging.
---Exams: I took this class during online classes so exams were different than there normally would be. Both midterms and the final were only a few questions long, but they usually weren't too hard.

---Projects: The project descriptions were not always easy to follow, but the professor and TAs will clarify everything. None were unreasonably hard, and all were graded reasonably. Some of the later projects do take a lot of time and are not something you can cram in a couple days.

---Tips: Google "Carey Nachenberg CS32". You'll find animated slides for CS32 that are extremely helpful. Go to office hours whenever you are working on a project: it will save you a ton of time and frustration.