Professor Ercegovac is so adorable and nice! Though he's not the clearest when explaining things in lecture, he is a lot better at clarifying the concepts if you go up to him after class or during office hours. Moreover, the textbook, which was written by him, is pretty easy to understand. The homeworks and exams are quite straightforward and not too difficult either. If I had to take CS M51A again, I'd still take it with Ercegovac!

I took this course in the winter of 2017, and received an A. Very cool class. I am strictly CS, and not CSE, but really enjoyed this class. The material was very interesting to me (i.e. designing and analyzing the combinational and sequential modules). This class has a very fair grading scheme: 10% homework (5), 20% quizzes (4), 30% midterm, and 40% final. The course is curved, and people generally get high marks on the homeworks and quizzes. The tests were very reasonable, and you could bring 2 pages of notes for each.

The lecture for this course is a complete waste of time. Professor Ercegovac is a very nice person and tries to add humor to the lectures. However, the lectures are useless as Professor just uses figures and words (sometimes verbatim) directly out of the book. Professor did however write the book, which is very useful. I attended two lectures in total, but read all of the required book chapters and did most of the book problems which were helpful.

The discussion section is also a joke, which I rarely attended. I only attended to turn in the homework or take the quizzes.

Grading: 10% hw, 20% quizzes, 30% midterm, 40% final
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For someone who came into UCLA with no CS background, this class had some very confusing material. Ercegovac does his best with nerdy jokes to engage students, but his lectures are often him just doing example problems from his slides in tiny handwriting on chalkboards or just going over the material in the slides. As the slides are just charts and examples from the textbook, lecture didn't seem completely worth my time. I stopped attending lecture as I often found myself lost, and instead turned to the textbook (written by Ercegovac) to learn the material. Particularly for the first chapters we covered, the textbook was more clear and informative than his lectures and provided sufficient examples and practice problems that I had a suitable grasp of the material. The 5 homeworks helped reinforce my practical knowledge of the material and was a reasonable amount each week or every other week. There were 2 logisim exercises in the homework, but those were reasonable. There were also 4 quizzes which forced students to keep up with the material.
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One big plus was that Ercegovac supplied a lot of practice material such as practice quizzes and exams so you had some idea of what to expect for the quizzes and midterm/final. The midterm ended up being harder than the practice midterm and covered some topics that weren't as emphasized in class. The final was actually very fair compared to the practice final, which was much appreciated. You get 2 pieces of paper, both sides, for both the midterm and final as cheat sheets (aka not fully open note/book).
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Discussion section was just the TA working through practice problems and answering questions on material covered. It was helpful sometimes, and confusing other times. Honestly, the best way to learn the material is just to read the textbook and do the practice problems as the problems later in the textbook are somewhat similar to what you might see in the final exam. Material is fairly dependent on earlier chapters, aka the material in chapters 2-3 were the basis of what we did in chapters 8 and on… so when you go back to review old chapters, you find that all the earlier chapters are pretty simple. The final focused on all the newer chapters, so review those and their practice problems to prepare. (btw, Ercegovac supplies solutions to most of the practice problems)
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Averages for all the homeworks/quizzes/exams were actually pretty low, as pretty much everyone is kinda confused on some of the material, or doesn't have the grasp necessary for the twists they add on the quizzes/exams. Oh and there was a little extra credit offered on the exams.
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Overall, I'd say the class is ok to take, as long as you put in the time to self-study and do the practice problems. The material isn't impossible, even if it starts pretty confusing. If you do the practice quizzes and exams, you should be OK for the actual ones… although the exams will probably be harder.

One of the worse professor in the CS department, he doesn't know how to lecture.
He assumes you know every thing when you are in his lecture. (Whats the point of going to lecture?)

Really nice guy, but not the best lecturer. Easy midterm but killer final. Definitely didn't expect the final to be that awful. Like, fuck.

But I guess overall the class wasn't too bad or stressful. Still, if you can afford to, I'd probably put off taking M51a until a better professor comes along (I hear Yutao He is pretty good).

He's a pretty terrible lecturer to be perfectly honest. Even when I read the textbook beforehand I still was lost in lecture. However, when I went to his office hours he was able to perfectly explain all my questions in an easy to understand way. He's also a really nice guy.

Never take this professor he is absolutely a horrible instructor. He has no skills in teaching. the only remarkable thing about this professor is that he wrote the course textbook which in my opinion lacks examples and clear definition of material. Attending lectures was definitely useless because his lecture slides was exactly the same as textbook and i had a hard time understanding his accent. if you stuck with this professor make sure you go to your discussion and ask your TA for help and don't bother going to lectures. i think you better off studying on your own and look up the course material on Google.

It is tough to rate this professor since M51A is such an awful class, but here goes. Ercegovac is a really nice guy that is very concerned about the students understanding of the material. He will go out of his way to encourage student feedback in class and tries to loosen the tension of Digital Circuit Design with geeky jokes. He is generally available outside of class and is always happy to answer questions, discuss the material or ask test questions to make you confident that you understand the material.

With that said, the class is extremely difficult and I did not find Ercegovac to be a great lecturer. He goes over the material and does a lot of examples, but I generally found myself lost in class and stopped attending around 4th week. Clearly a lot of this is because of the material, but it is hard to say if other teachers would hold the students' interest better. Fortunately, the class was largely taught out of the book, so reading the book somewhat clarified things. The book isn't great though, so I would often go to office hours to essentially receive free tutoring from the TA. In retrospect, doing the reading before lecture probably would have made the class useful since the examples in class would have made sense to me and served as a review. I think the place I really learned the material was in trying to do the homework, since I would dig through the examples in the book and ask questions during office hours, until I finally understood how to solve the problems. I was also lucky enough to have a great TA, Pouya Dormiani, who went out of his way to explain things well in discussion section, office hours and reviews.

Difficulty-wise, this class is hell. Being a CS major with no engineering background, it was like learning a new language where nothing made sense until around the 3rd or 4th week. Tough it out though, and the class becomes rewarding around the midterm when things start to make sense. By week 7 or 8 things are still hard, but move more toward pluggable modules that are easy to understand and highly applicable. Fortunately I did not give into the many temptations to drop the course, and by investing 10-20 hours a week into this class I managed to get an A. My main advise is to do the reading before lectures, and to take advantage of office hours. Start homework early and do the reading early, so you can attend office hours before you fall behind.

Hopefully you get a good sense of what M51A with Ercegovac is like. Overall he is an average teacher, which compared to the other 51A teachers makes him look like a star. Since this class is going to be painful no matter what, I suppose it is at least good to take Ercegovac who goes out of his way to be helpful and nice. Hope for a good TA and plan to learn the material by manipulating Ercegovac and the TA's into 1-on-1 tutoring during office hours. I was amazed at how few people took advantage of this and that I was the only person that said to the TA during office hours "I am lost. Can you explain the difference between p-type and n-type mos, why we need both and how I implement each? Can you give me some examples I can do right now to make sure I understand?" Always remember that everyone else in the class is also completely lost, so even if you feel like you have no idea what's going on 90% of the time, you can still get an A. I thought I failed the final, and ended up getting 30% above the mean since everyone else also failed.