Comparing to his 111, Professor Eggert's 131 is much more managable. All you need to do is understand his lecture content and know your homeworks & projects by heart during exams.

I really wanted to like this class because Eggert was legitimately an interesting lecturer (unlike his CS33). I felt I learned a lot by going to class. Unfortunately that's ruined by every other part of this course.

TAs are one of the most important parts of getting through this class. Go to different discussions and compare with your friends. A good TA makes all the difference and some are more generous about giving tips on the homework than others. A few of the assignments involve written reports, which is annoying but at the same time is easier than the 100% code ones. I'd rather write more reports than pull my hair out over OCaml .

Tests are your standard Eggert tests. It's open book/note so bring all the things you want but it just comes down to whether you're lucky enough that the things you focus on happen to be what he write questions about.

Half the assignments consist of Eggert flexing on all of us about how he contributed to Linux coreutils. The lab sections' quality varies drastically since the class isn't standardized with one lecture, and obviously TAs vary. Most assignments are vaguely written up and expect you to be an almost-expert on the topic after learning about it for the first time for an hour and a half. The 3-unit listing is incredibly deceiving — the assignments are exceptionally time-consuming (particularly 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 — almost of all of them at this point) if you aren't well-versed in the topics the way Eggert has been for decades.

The final was by far the worst final I've taken. He and his TAs' goal in writing the common final is having a median of 50%, but they slightly missed the mark on that with a median around 54% (*gasp*). The variations from question to question are rather drastic; a few are reasonably written to test your grasp of concepts, but others ask you to demonstrate proficiency in writing full-featured scripts/programs using a variety of languages and libraries by hand. Your score on the final might as well have been generated by a random number generator designed to have a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10.

His assignment late policy was rather lenient, though. That might be the only redeeming quality. Some of the topics covered in 35L are relatively important and practical, but overall this class is designed incredibly poorly.

The textbook for this class is actually amazing. Highly recommend dishing out the fat stacks of cash to buy it because it is well worth it. It is easy to understand, often funny, engaging, AND it covers EVERYTHING Eggert talks about in lecture. Seriously. Honestly, don't go to a single lecture. It's a waste of time. Just read the textbook, it's much better at explaining than Eggert.

the workload is too much and u r not gonna learn much. The class is designed to make you hate com sci. If you are a genius, forget what I just said. But if u r checking this, u r probably not.

assignment 9 was pretty horrible. it was a completely new assignment that the TAs were like "we haven't started it either so we can't help you yet and we have no idea as well what its about" so basically you head into week 10 with no time to study for your finals because you ahve to wait until monday or tuesday to see if you can get any hints from your lab section but as usual, you don't get anything so you just gotta do the assignment yourself, cry a lot, finally give up, but you've already lost so many hours of precious study time on this assignment -- if you get this same assignment start on it as soon as possible and never have hope that your lab section will give you any hints on how to start, for any project. the other assignments obviously took a super long time but it was a whole learning process and less stressful than assignment 9 because you don't need to worry as much about not having time to study for all your other classes's exams that are worth half your grade, ya know? and it was graded so, so harshly... no mercy or help at all but I guess you will also experience this amount of stress and pressure in the workplace allegedly. sounds like I will be changing majors so I can avoid these kinds of workplaces.
kedar is a fantastic ta he is so nice.
the final sucked so bad i dont remember any of it other than it being one of the most horrible experiences ever.

This class is a mess.
More specifically, there were 10 assignments with this class, some of which are easier than others. Of the particular, the most challenging assignments were certainly 2, 5, and 9.
Assignment 2 dealt with bash, which had really weird syntax, vastly different from C++.
Assignment 5 dealt with system calls and relates back to 4, so you better make sure your assignment 4 is working properly from before.
Assignment 9 is a new assignment. The TA that made it made the homework portion way too difficult. With finals week coming up, I couldn't finish it fully.

The final was difficult, but not impossible. One of the question is multiple choice, just guess for that one. It's basically a trivia contest. The other questions are more related to the class and all of them should be doable if you have a good grasp of the material. The main thing is that you have to be fast. You can also bring notes in, but don't get too confident as reading your notes may take up more time than you think.

I would say people should avoid this class if they can. However, I don't think there is a choice if this is a major req. Eggert will not appear in lab sessions, so the class experience kind of depend on the TA. I am pretty lucky to get a GREAT TA (take Zhaowei Tan's section if you can!!). He is really clear and organized and he really tries to make me suffer as little as possible. The final is hard. I think what everyone is doing is basically print out as much project and online cheatsheets as they can and try to copy the right one onto their papers. I can't say this class is useless because after this class I find myself familiar with shell and python etc., but the experience is too much of a suffer.

I think most of the sentiments echoed in previous reviews hold true for me. The course IS tough, the workload IS heavy, it is extremely frustrating dealing with some of the requirements, and you WILL bang your head on the table. Sometimes the grading seems arbitrary. Sometimes you put in far more work than you feel your grade acknowledges. Sometimes you hate the way the TA's respond to you or your classmates. As far as all of that goes, nothing seems to have changed about the course compared to previous reviews.

I will say, however, that I am happy to have learned everything we went over in the course. It's nice to simply know the stuff, but it's even better to understand WHY and HOW. The knowledge of the material is not divorced from the knowledge you need in other courses. In fact, there was a surprising amount of overlap between classes I have taken and will need to take. The main difference is that this class is less theoretical, and focusses on more practical aspects of software and systems. Many people complain about how little practical application we get at UCLA. I think this course definitely satisfies the need, albeit in a difficult manner.

If you learn to enjoy the material, and you can get past the (sometimes) arbitrary grading (I got many low scores, but still got the A), then you should be alright.

35L has a bad reputation for a reason. I just took CS 111, and the workloads are pretty much the same except for the readings--which is insane. The TAs try their best to teach whatever language you're covering in two days, but there isn't much you can cram of the basics of C/python/Bash in four hours while also covering the spec. The specs are often confusing and in the case of my specific quarter, wrong (we had to check a google doc instead for one lab). If you have a bad TA, just go to a good one--your grade depends on it! You don't get your grades back before the next project and a few rely on the previous project. There isn't a test script like with 111 so if your program is consistently slightly wrong, you're screwed. Also,The beaglebone is used once and it costs $100. Overall, this class is trial by fire.