I took this class during Spring 2020 so it was online. Professor John Cho did a remarkable job by showing plenty of examples, responding to questions in the Zoom chat and on Piazza. I opted to take this P/NP so I did not take the exams. The projects were fair and felt like they addressed useful knowledge. I enjoyed his class and (at least without exams) would recommend it to everyone!

Pretty interesting and useful class. I would say Professor Cho did a great job teaching this class and all the projects are well designed and fun, although some of them are pretty time consuming. (project 3, 4)

Best class at UCLA by far. You must take it with Professor Cho if you can!!

PROFESSOR: Professor Cho is probably the best professor I've had at UCLA. He's incredibly clear, helpful, and patient. His lectures are easy to follower and very organized. His slides are simple which makes them easy to follow and add your own notes to. He walked me through some confusion step by step during his office hours and was very patient when I was not understanding some stuff. Lectures are all recorded and posted literally like 5 minutes after class. Professor Cho is very receptive to feedback and also active on Campuswire which is helpful. He is strict with some rules and deadlines though so as long as you manage your time and stay organized you will be fine.

DISCUSSIONS: Professor Cho set it up so that one discussion was for lecture review and the other was for project questions. This was really smart of him because it means you can budget your time efficiently and go to the discussion that suit you the best for that week. The 3 TAs (Lingxiao, Boyuan, Song) are all so patient and helpful. They were willing to debug my projects with me even though it was way past their office hours/discussion times). Discussions are also all recorded.

PROJECTS: The projects are challenging but also very interesting and so helpful in learning web dev skills. This is definitely one of the most practically useful classes to take if you want to get more project experience without being in clubs. There's 5 projects, where projects 2, 3, and 4 are weighted more and are also more complicated. They were graded via Gradescope and Professor Cho set up an autograder so you could submit as many times before the deadline and see which test cases you're failing. The one thing is that sometimes the test case descriptions are vague and even when my local testing works, it fails the autograder.

EXAMS: No exams during Spring 2021 (COVID). Grades are 100% project based.

CS144 is probably the most useful class I've taken as a CS major. The projects aren't that bad, most of the work you'll be doing is understanding the basics of each language/framework/etc. than actually coding. So if you have any experience in the stuff the prof will be covering, the projects could be done in less than 10 hours. I myself had no experience and still the projects took on average 20 hours. Gradescope gives a lot of the testcases for the projects as well and so it is extremely easy to get high scores. The lecture itself is slides heavy but the prof still does an amazing job explaining concepts and does a bunch of real time coding examples. I HIGHLY recommend CS144 with John Cho, easily top 3 class I've taken at UCLA.

This class is probably the most useful class being taught at UCLA right now. You learn a lot, but I'm guessing the grading will be a bit of a problem !

I took CS 143 and CS 144 with him.
I absolutely loved him!!
He is a great prof and cares about his students.
Chu Cheng and Young were our TA's and they were really good too!!
His projects are awesome and have helped me get internships at Yahoo and Microsoft.
We make a mini IMDB web app in 143 and a legit Ebay Web app in 144.
His tests were hard but i had past exams(he repeats them) so pretty much aced them.
Go to lecture guys, it will help.
And take John Cho you will have a great time.

You learn something new in every lecture. It is a lot of material, but he explains it pretty well, though he goes pretty fast. If you don't go to lecture, or if you go to lecture but don't pay rapt attention, you will have trouble with this class. In fact, I'll say that if you don't go to the Discussion you will have trouble with this class.

Cho does what a good teacher should: teach well enough that you have to put in effort to completely understand it. You don't have to teach it to yourself, but you really have to put in the effort.

There were 5 projects, and they took lotsssssssssssssss of time; comparable to CS 111...
You learn SO MUCH. You learn Java, Javascript, SQL, JDBC, Lucene Index, a bit of computer security, database design, AJAX, HTML, XML, DTD, a bit of CSS, Java Servlets, etc. It is insane how much you learn. But it is a ton of work.