Prof. Vandenberghe is one of the best teachers at UCLA. A brilliant guy, he gives such elegant solutions to the craziest looking optimization problems, one tends to just sit back and watch him weave his magic. Anyone can stop him at any point in the class and ask him to explain something again without ever feeling like an idiot. Plus, he is hot. Really hot. It's his voice and accent, I think. And also his ramrod posture and God-like European features.

Vandenberghe is a co-author of the Nonlinear Programming book so he lectures pretty much straight off slides based off of the textbook. HWs were difficult and fairly time-consuming with both written and MATLAB questions, but if you read the material from the textbook, there are many similar examples that are helpful. The final exam is worth 75% of the overall grade but its difficulty is on par with the HWs. He's very helpful at his office hours, and also provides HW help during class. Goes fairly quickly in lecture over course material, but he does go through almost all the proofs/examples step-by-step. Overall a very good professor, I would definitely recommend him.