Let me be clear, GitHub and StackOverflow are your teachers in this class. That, and the phrase "20+hrs/week" are all you need to know about this class.

Special shoutout to Tang Mohan for being the most useless and careless TA of all time. Good job for not explaining jackshit and talking down on students who want to get clarity for the most convoluted questions ever written on the exams. You fucking suck.

This class is going to change your life, but not in a good way. CS 35L is basically a lower division capstone project, and takes up so much of your time. DO NOT take other challenging courses in the same quarter unless you're already familiar with Emacs, Git and a few programming languages.

By change your life, I mean that you will change all your schedules to work around Eggert. Your holidays and free time will be spent working on his homework or project. Say goodbye to a normal study schedule as assignments will probably take longer than you need.

I actually liked Eggert's lectures and he covered some interesting concepts (would be a great guest lecturer). However, it is so out of sync with the homework and project that you will find yourself thinking that the class is broken (I did several times). You have to remember that his lectures are more or less independent of the rest of the class. If the assignment involves coding in Python, don't wait for his Python lecture before starting. Use TA notes and your own knowledge to start projects ASAP, as that's the only way to not fall behind.

The group project at the end is about programming a web app from scratch, which is actually pretty fun if you have a good team. You are free to choose whatever idea and technology stack works for you, and there are lots of tutorials available as needed.

Eggert's exams though... if you have a mindset of aiming to get 100%, it's time to let that go. He makes his exams extremely challenging and long, and a lot of it is computer science theory (meaning answers are paragraphs and it almost seems like a philosophy exam). While you will almost definitely be depressed with your exam scores, remember that Eggert wants a bell curve and tries to use it as needed.

Best of luck, you'll need it

Be warned! This class is nothing like other lower-div classes such as CS31 and 32. I aced CS 31-33 but failed miserably in this class. CS97 and probably CS35l require a higher level of ability of self study and conquering problems on your own.

Eggert, as a lecturer, is very enthusiastic and knowledgable. I can tell he is super passionate about computer science and knows a ton. However, the workload and rigor of this class is TOO MUCH. I can barely catch a break while I was in this class. The professor's lectures were all over the place, with no clear direction and random concepts thrown in as a mush. I still do not understand many of the concepts of the class. Eggert's exams were impossible to study for, as he just puts whatever he wants. Overall, I applaud him for being a good lecturer, but the course needs to be organized better.

If you actually do the readings, this class will be a lot of work. I read all the assigned A.D readings and additional readings and did most of the S.K. readings (all of those before the midterm and chapter 11). The discussions are very helpful and my TA was very helpful in telling us how to approach the project and often times gave us pseudo or actual code to implement the project. The projects are relatively time consuming but for the most part aren't super difficult.

I got 80% on one of the projects but over 90/100 on all the other projects. I got a 49.5% on the midterm after a regrade(mean was 49.5% and median was 51%). The TA's grade the report at the end and don't seem to care much so I got 100 on it even though I completely rewrote it the day it was due in like an hour. The final was open book and open note so I had a whole binder with a table of contents that really helped in the final which I got a 77% on and ended up with an A overall in the class.

I definitely suggest going to his office hours to clarify on concepts in readings/in class because he is really good at explaining in smaller settings and is a really nice person, so don't be intimidated!

Beware of this class! 35L drained so much of my time, so make sure to schedule your quarter appropriately. As others have stated, there needs to be some restructuring.
This class had 2 lab sections per week, with a lab assignment due at the beginning of each week. Attendance for these sections is not mandatory, and usefulness depends on ur TA. Labs 2, 4, 5, and 9 were especially time consuming for me, and all the other labs were still either difficult or annoying af. I turned in most of the labs late, so my lab average was about an 82. I did feel like I learned a lot from trying to do the labs, but this did not help at all for the final lmao. I pulled up with textbooks and hundreds of pages of notes and scored around the median (52), which got me a B. The final was 17 PAGES of the hardest shit ever. Each of the 10 questions were weighted equally and had to do with one of the labs. I straight up left a question blank after reading the directions lool and totally guessed on the multiple choice. There were basically no free points at all, so good luck on that lmao. 3 units does not correspond at all to the necessary workload of this course, and after hours and hours of work I escaped with a B. This class also takes hella time away from all your other courses, so be ready for that

CS35L is probably the hardest class I've taken so far. You have 10+ hours worth of assignments each week, and a huge final project. The midterms and finals were all pretty hard and open ended, although this quarter Eggert experimented with MCQs. That being said, I've learned so much from this course and I genuinely believe that this is the most important computer science course. The skills you learn from this course are super applicable (shell scripting, web dev, maybe not elisp, makefiles, git).

For the midterm and final, I suggest having super detailed notes that you can copy down in the exam. Make sure to understand the bigger ideas and how different topics link together.

For the final project, try to find a good team and START EARLY.

did not actually take this class but it fully fucked my friend. prayers up for my billah boys

I think I learned a lot from this course, but at the expense of my mental health unfortunately. The lectures are a bit all over the place in terms of organization, and it is sometimes difficult to know what are the essential concepts to take away from a lesson are. I do appreciate the professor's enthusiasm and extensive domain knowledge on the subject, and his little tidbits and asides kept the lectures from being dull. He is also really good at addressing questions that are brought up during lecture and is approachable in that regard. Overall, the lectures were very informational, but not very digestible. Sometimes the "bigger picture" was lost in the focus on minute details.

The homework/projects, on the other hand, are an utter mess. I wish I was being hyperbolic. The assignments are written in a way that almost seems like they are intentionally trying to be confusing and frustrating for students. I quickly learned that there is very little point in starting the homework before discussion section because it is simply not worth my time to decipher (and probably misinterpret) the assignment. Luckily, the TAs are great in filling the gaps in this respect, but their absolute necessity to make any meaningful progress on the assignments is very telling of their quality. Keeping updated on every Piazza post is a must to not lose points on arbitrary requirements that were mentioned vaguely, if at all in the assignment. For example, the Scheme parsing assignment is nearly impossible to complete by just reading the very open-ended specifications -- you almost have to code against the already additional sample test cases provided by the TAs to have a chance to do well or spend hours writing code to handle edge cases at random. This was especially frustrating because new test cases would be updated multiple times throughout the assignment period, though I am at least thankful they existed to make up for the shortcomings of the specification.

The stress of these assignments that many students complain about come from this dispiriting experience of programming based on assumptions that they are forced to make while waiting on TA's to confirm/deny via Piazza. It is sad to say that it is actually a viable strategy to wait for these Piazza clarification posts before starting the assignment. Overall, even though the assignments could be better formulated, I did feel like I learned a lot about the different programming styles by completing them. It's just a shame that my experience had to be this way, and although I think the TAs did a great job considering these circumstances, the course should be able to stand on its own.