CS 118 with professor Varghese was one of my favorite classes here at UCLA! He's super passionate about the material, and is really good at breaking it down into easy-to-understand segments. We had one problem set every two weeks, but the homework and the tests followed the class material pretty closely. We also had one project about forwarding IPv4 packets for a router, which was fairly time consuming, but I would say overall the workload for this class isn't super heavy. Prof. Varghese also posts detailed notes for important topics, so you're never short of study materials.

If you need evidence that Varghese is a good lecturer, his lectures were always pretty full, even though he didn't take attendance or require participation. The only complaint I have is that he tends to talk and move through slides very quickly, but there's a lot of material to go through so it makes sense.

I highly recommend taking this class!