Pretty solid professor, although his lectures can get a little boring sometimes. You definitely can't go wrong with Smallberg, and if you can pay attention for the entire 2 hours you will have a clear and conceptually deep understanding of the material.

The work for the class consists of five homework assignments, four projects, two midterms, and a final (which was made optional for our class given the circumstances). The homework assignments are reasonable, and can be completed in a few hours if done diligently. The first two projects are similar in difficulty to the homework assignments and do not require much work, maybe in the ballpark of a couple hours a day for a few days and you should be good. The last two are significantly longer and more difficult, but not impossible to complete on time; moreover, you will definitely strengthen your programming skills upon successfully doing them. The midterms were pretty easy in my opinion, and were doable with minimal studying if you paid attention and knew the material. It's not entirely clear what method he uses to assign letter grades, but 90+% raw = A is as good a guess as I have been able to make.

Overall, good professor and a fine class, even though projects 3 and 4 were a pain in the ass.

granted this was during spring 2020 so corona made things tough but smallberg is the worst professor i've ever had. by the final, he hadn't graded either of the midterms or any assignment since week 3. he also never gave us a syllabus or true grading scheme until two hours before the pass/no pass decision deadline. he barely gave us an "estimate" ish of our grade an hour before we had to make those decisions for pass/no pass and was very snarky throughout the quarter in his responses to students. he also changed the entire format of midterms a few hours before the actual midterms themselves. i found it more useful to skip his lectures and use nachenbergs slides instead. nachenbergs slides will get you 10x farther than smallbergs lectures will. i spent 90% of my time all quarter doing work for this class and had to neglect my other classes. projects take an insane amount of time. project 3 is just pure insanity. terrible class. i did learn a lot of fundamentals (from nachenberg not smallberg of course) but this class was a nightmare

My only word for him is a bad word

this class has good material, and smallberg is an efficient professor
but i felt the grading and workload of this class was highly unnecessary. projects are heavily long and inconsiderate of time of students, and while i see how it lets practice with some concepts, it gets really repetitive (do i really need 5 classes for same style of objects)
i think the tests were nice and a much better measure of how well somebody understood the concept, especially with how some people "collaborate" too much, but tests are a level playing field. this class should grade more based on tests and reduce project workload.

This class is definitely challenging, but overall wasn't too bad. It is really important to stay ahead of your work, as Smallberg does not accept late projects. The TAs are very helpful and office hours can ease your mind before submitting a project.

This class took up my whole quarter. The last half of the quarter the projects get crazy time consuming. It seemed like we were always doing a project or studying for an exam, there wasnt a time where I wasnt doing CS32. Smallberg definitely knows a lot about CS, but his lectures are filled with trivia about non-CS topics and him explaining what not to do. Whenever I went to lecture everyone was asleep or not paying attention and online shopping. We got behind in lecture, meaning for nearly all of the projects and homework assignments we were using topics that hadn't been talked about in class. Fortunately, Professor Nachenberg has slides that are extremely helpful, which is what my friends and I used to learn the material. There are LA workshops once a week usually which can be helpful depending on the LAs teaching. TA discussion section is also helpful (my TA taught us a lot clearer than the professor), but that depends on your TA. Be prepared to do a lot of self-study to get the concepts and have very little time to study for exams ( you usually have a project due the day before an exam). However, this is an extremely important class for CS so be sure to take it during a quarter where you can put all of your time into it!

spring quarter already started and he still did not give back 2 project grades and final exam grades

its like his cs31 class but more work

Course syllabus, projects and tests are the same as for Nachenberg's class during Winter quarter. First half of the class was pretty manageable, while the second half switches pace to cover more involved topics and complex data structures. Though Project 3 might be the infamous one, do not overlook Project 4 either - start it early!

I love microberg. The class is way easier in the Spring, and super manageable. Project 3 is really boring and time consuming, with no really tricky part, just a lot of busy work. But, they grade it easily and you are not expected to finish all of it, so that's a plus.