I love this big beautiful sexy man. One of the best teachers I've ever had, and he taught a very sexy and interesting subject (wooo filters!). So insanely nice and kind and understanding and gives so much extra credit. I would love to take this class again (or any class with him in the future for that matter).

Depending on the time sequence of your circuit-related physics/engineering courses, many concepts may appear elsewhere before (physics 1 series, ECE 3...). In general, this course is a good review and elevation to circuit theory fundamentals. Professor Darabi has a well-structured lecture with examples, but it is still worthwhile to do practice problems from other sources before the exams besides the given examples and homework problems (don't forget to review transformer equations). The textbook is probably the only thing to be improved for this course, as I personally think it is a little bit old (from half a century ago), but as long as you follow the lectures, you do not need it.

Darabi is an excellent lecturer, and I enjoyed the class. However, as implied with the honors notation, this class is more difficult, and goes more in depth than the regular counterpart. There is a curve, and I am likely among those saved by the curve. Darabi handwrites his notes on the whiteboard and does not record lectures for the most part, so it's not as easy to catch up if you miss a lecture, and assigns homework roughly every other week. The homework consists of 6 to 7 mandatory problems, and the rest are bonus questions. The exams are intuitive if you understand capacitors and inductors well, otherwise they are a bit of a pain. Would take another class with Darabi again.

If you liked using the AD2 from ECE 3 well you're in luck because this class uses the AD2 for the entire quarter. You learn about basic circuits (matching the pace with ECE 10/ECE 10H), from voltage dividers, up to multi-order RLC circuits. 4 labs, 4 reports (roughly 8 pages long), assigned every two weeks, with the lab specs for the entire quarter published at the start of the quarter. The labs and reports are expected to be completed by each individual. Lots of people cram doing the lab and the report 48 hours before it's due. You will likely also do that too. If you decide to do the labs early and do the report later, you'll likely have to repeat doing the lab as well. Lab sections are not mandatory, EXCEPT for the days your reports are due, as for my quarter there was a "quiz" and practical demo required for checkoffs. For the checkoffs, I partnered up with a friend, but that policy is up to your TA.

Only dislike is his failure to record lectures.

Darabi is a pretty good professor. His lectures are clear and has a really good intuition of circuit analysis. This class comprised of 4 homework assignments, a midterm, and a final. These are all rather difficult assignments. If you pay attention in class and study the homeworks, you should be able to do well on the exams.

Professor Hooman gives great intuition about circuit analysis in the time domain. His midterm and final were relatively hard but you can get a 100% on both if you listen to him during lecture and make sure you understand the homeworks. Homeworks were okay with 1 or 2 hard questions on each homework. He also introduces stuff like diodes, transistors, frequency response plots which weren't necessary but I guess that's probably because its the honors version.

Darabi was a good lecturer. The homework is tough, but the TAs help the students through it in discussion. The tests were very difficult and graded harshly. You are not allowed to use a calculator but will still be expected to do some annoying algebra. This is not an easy course, but for EE, you have to take it. The class won't be a terrible experience, but the tests will be.

The lab is a terrible experience with terrible TAs and stressful demos. I got an A in the lab, but I'm left with a bitter taste over how poorly managed it was. They had given us incomplete lab kits at first. When asked how they want something in the report, they will give you a ridiculous answer that asks way too much. In the end, every student did it differently and it didn't really matter. My advice for the lab is to complete it before the demo and to not waste your time organizing the report really carefully. If you touch on everything they want in the discussion questions, that is the most important part.

I do recommend taking this course with this professor. It could have been a lot worse. With required and core EE courses, you kind of just have to bite the bullet because many of them suck. The ones I liked were 131A with Dolecek, 102 with Kao, 141 with Gharesifard, and 121B with Emaminejad. The worst was 2 with Sokolich (bad lecturer), 3 with Briggs (very mean), 101A with Candler (bad lecturer), and M16 with Mani (bad lecturer and very mean).

I really enjoyed taking 10H with Darabi: this class really made me appreciate circuits and further developed my intuition for them. Some of the content was review from ECE 3 or Physics 1B -- we only get to 2nd-order circuits, and the course largely works with resistors, capacitors, and inductors as its 3 main components. However, the intuition and depth the course introduced with just these 3 fundamental components went far beyond what was covered in the previous 2 courses. On this note, Darabi the lecturer must be given his due credit. He has a way of framing circuits that simultaneously generalizes its properties so as to give a broad, eagle-eye view whilst also detailing it with precision. He doesn't hand-wave out exceptions. For example, he defined a resistor as "any component in which a graph can be drawn with its voltage on one axis and its current on the other." In this way, a diode can be classified as a resistor. Resistors which do not "obey" Ohm's Law exactly are also classified as resistors. He does this with all other topics introduced as well. Though the class mostly concerns itself with LTI circuits and consequently LTI components, rendering this fact a miniscule portion of the course, this introduction to resistors allows for a more broad-eyed view on circuits, perhaps as a precursor of what is to follow in proceeding courses, which I greatly appreciated.

The workload was manageable. We had overall 4 homework sets throughout the quarter, each spaced around 2-3 weeks apart, and only one midterm along. The first homework is significantly less time-consuming than the others, taking roughly 2-3 hours to complete. The other homeworks roughly average around 6-12 hours each, each homework set taking more time than the previous to complete. Each homework set consists of approximately 8 or 9 questions, with typically 3 of them being extra credit. I found these problems quite tricky, especially at first in Homework 2 when the circuits became more complex than what I was used to in previous courses, but they were quite fun as well and required you to be a little clever, which is sometimes enjoyable. Eventually though the problems do give you repetitive practice and your abilities for solving them grow. You will find that most circuits are simply 1st/2nd order differential equations and most circuit analysis techniques are simply clever ways to describe circuits as systems of differential equations in as convenient a manner as possible. By Homeworks 3 and 4 I felt as though I was doing Math 33B work. It is time-consuming, but most of the cleverness goes into the beginning 10% of the problem when you are identifying what to best focus on writing into equation, and the rest of the 90% is the laboriousness of solving the differential equation.

The midterm and final were much easier than the homeworks, around 75% of the difficulty (although I didn't take into account the fact that I was much more experienced doing the final than I was in the homeworks leading up to it). Class performance was reportedly great, with many students receiving perfect scores on the midterm.

Overall it was a great class, and I'd highly recommend it.

Professor Darabi is truly the best. If you have an opportunity to take this class with him, do it. He's clear in his lectures, and his homeworks and exams are reasonable. He's funny and sometimes makes jokes in class, and he is very good at explaining all of the concepts and making sure that he does plenty of examples. Best EE professor.