Just an average CS guy but this class almost had me drop out of college. My only motivation at time was only because I'm so close to graduating

Yes, it's hard, but Eggert is a great lecturer and the content is good. One of the best CS classes here overall

All I gotta say is, it is a goddamn miracle that I passed this class.

That is all.

Pretty much like all the other reviews have already said.

Don't take this class, but obviously you have to take it so take it. You'll get through it fine.

Bad. I don't know what I learned and I don't know what I'm looking at when he's drawing diagrams. The only good parts of lecture is when he shares his personal anecdotes or is funny. If you've already taken 111, workload-wise this class is not as bad; the projects are way shorter than 111. Taking 161 is also helpful because Lisp is similar to the languages you have to pick up in this class.

This is the most pointless and unreasonably tough courses I have taken at UCLA. You will teach yourself 90% of the material. The projects, with the exception of hw1,hw4, and the project, are all unreasonably difficult and convoluted, and really, nobody knows whats happening and you can bet that tons of students in the course are githubbing most of the hard parts. The exams are written the night before, as stated by the professor, and the averages can wildly vary from 50%-70%. Make sure you read the book and/or review lecture to perform as well as one can on his exams. As usual with eggert you can expect a fat curve at the end but its never consistent so you cant rely on it. FWIW, when I calculated my raw grade with all assignments/exams graded I had a 59.9, and came out with a C .

Honestly people should be pretty prepared for a difficult class whenever it's with Professor Eggert. Projects are time consuming (especially for the second OCaml and the Scheme one). Tests are difficult but something might help for all Eggert tests: they are more about intuitions, so basically whenever you come up with some sort of answer, just write, don't even bother to think too much or too deep about the them. Just let your intuition guide you through would be less confusing and might give better outcomes. Ahhh all that being said I do learn many things in this class and honestly Eggert lectures are good, it's homework and tests that sucks :))

I mean... it's Eggert.
This class is insanely hard, because it's Eggert. The tests are difficult even after watching every lecture, studying, doing the projects, and reading the textbook. That's just how it is. But the curve is great! Midterm and final were both very low averages, but significantly curved, as is classic in Eggert's classes. The lectures focused on the theory behind programming languages in general, as well as the theory behind specific languages (OCaml, Prolog, Java, I'm probably missing one). The projects were much more focused on exploiting specific features of those languages. The final project was non-programming, but rather a comparison of features among a few languages based on what we'd learned in the class. Projects were /insanely/time-consuming if you didn't have help, so start early and set aside a lot of time.
Lectures, as always with Eggert, were engaging and interesting, but kinda hard to follow since they are rarely organized and linear.

[ONLINE QUARTER REVIEW] I got hammered by 35L, so I really wasn't looking forward to this Eggman class. However, I found that I liked the material a lot more and actually kept up with it through the quarter.
- Lifesaver: https://github.com/CS131-TA-team/UCLA_CS131_CodeHelp
- Do the coding assignments yourself, or at the very least, try for a while before succumbing to github. The TA help code above makes doing the assignments by yourself a lot easier than it may have been in previous years. I found that doing the assignments legit made the midterm and final a lot more manageable.
- Eggert is a very captivating lecturer, but you might feel like he rambles a bit (he does). However, he tests on the obscure parts of his lecture. Make sure you have a transcript of all the notes going into the tests.

My biggest criticism of this class is that as soon as you get good at a programming language, you have to switch to a new one. And the scheme project is a complete bitch.

Like every other review on here, this class is hard. It's a ton of work. The exams are very eggert. He said on the day of the final that there was a question on it that he didn't know the answer to. The biggest piece of advice I can provide is to make sure that you do this with other courses that are easy because this class is a huge time suck.