Professor Salazar was incredibly sweet and kind to us students during the Spring 2020 quarter. At first, I was concerned about taking Math 61 with him because of his mediocre BruinWalk rating, but I have to say that I am really glad that I ignored them and took the class anyway. Firstly, his class was very fair. All our exams had problems similar to the homework, so earning a good grade was a matter of being diligent and doing all your assignments. Also, the reviews that talk about him being a terrible lecture are totally untrue, in my opinion – there are times where he goes a little bit too fast, but he always answers questions during lecture and overall does a good job keeping everyone on task. The only thing I'm concerned about is learning – since we had open note + open internet exams, I did feel like I didn't learn as much from the exams. Additionally, because of the circumstances around this quarter, we did not finish all the material that is typically covered in the course, which makes me slightly concerned about future courses that might use some of that information. But, despite that, Salazar is an incredibly nice human being and I would highly recommend his class.

nice guy

I really don't understand why Professor Salazar has so many harsh reviews... throughout this summer course, he has been very kind and understanding. On numerous occasions, he has shown that he cares about his students and wants them to fully grasp the concepts he teaches:

a. He creates discussion forums on CCLE for students to post questions about the homework questions, and he answers them thoroughly and promptly
b. He sets very lenient deadlines for all the quizzes and homeworks in an attempt to decrease the stress of online learning
c. He places much less emphasis on exams (15% for each midterm and 10% for the final) than he does on the weekly quizzes (40% on 8 quizzes spread throughout the course), because he believes that consistent efforts matter much more than single-day performances
d. He even changed the conditions for the final exam to accommodate for a Scholarly Strike (on behalf of BLM) that took place during Finals week.

While it's true that he occasionally rambles or makes mistakes during the lectures, the majority of his lectures were pretty clear. More importantly, his grading scheme, his homework assignments, and his quizzes/exams were all very fair and low-stress.

I went into this class with a year of prior coding experience so I thought I would be okay but man, I had to work really hard for that A-. In the beginning, the class and homework assignments were not that bad, but I believe it was homework 4 took me SUCH a long time to figure out. We also do graphics which even CS 31 does not learn because graphics in C++ is just inefficient and rather ugly and no one uses C++ for that reason.
Salazar was a genuinely nice person when you went into office hours but his lectures were long and boring, causing me to fall asleep on multiple occasions. He mumbles a lot which made it very difficult to follow on.
Overall, do not recommend the teacher, but would recommend the class if you just want some programming experience.

I don't think the comments in bruinwalk truly represent Professor Salazar. He is really really nice and warm. He cares his students a lot. He explains things carefully and slowly in lecture. He has two quizzes every week but it is very easy as long as you do all your homework. Exams are easy and are based on homework.

Please don't take him for PIC 10A, he will screw you over.

Please do not take this professor for PIC 10a. The first few weeks of class seem alright, but after week 4 the class gets extremely challenging and the professor is absolutely terrible at explaining the concepts. I would highly recommend taking another professor for this class because Salazar does not do a good job at teaching this course.

Worst class I've ever had in UCLA. All he does is mumbling and making everyone asleep. Nice place if you wanna find a place to take a nap on campus.

I would rate him 0 if bruinwalk allowed me to. I managed an A only because I had 4 years of prior programming experience. But believe this guy redefines 'bad'. He simply does not know how to teach... He is not helpful at all, doesn't particularly cares about students. The best part is yet to come... he exams are extremely hard. Given that he does not know how to teach and that he is pretty much a useless instructor he expects too much from his students. If you think you'll manage think again... trust me this guy is not worth it!

Okay, so you know what sucks? When people around you tell you that PIC 10A is supposed to be an "easy" class and by the time you take your first midterm in Salazar's, you walk out feeling dejected because you never expected the tests to have such trickery in them. Let me tell you the reality behind it all.

There are two grading schemes.
25% HW, 20% Midterm 1, 20% Midterm 2, 35% Final
25% HW, 30% Better Midterm, 44% Final, 1% Participation (which you get by like answering questions, doing stuff on the forums, etc.)

The homework assignments are programming assignments. A couple of them have like 4 possible points of extra credit you can get, but honestly these things aren't bad at all. Make sure you test them in the PIC lab or else you'll get a 0 for the assignment, which CAN be fixed if you fix your program up and do this email process thing.

The first midterm was a sneaky bastard. Its average was the highest out of all the exams (About 70%), but there was this one question that had this BS trick that apparently took so many people by storm, NOBODY ended up getting above 92%.

The second midterm was tough as well. Its average was I think high 60s, but I ended up doing better on it than midterm 1.

The final was the hardest of the three exams, with an average like 1 or 2 percent lower than midterm 2, but I somehow miraculously pulled through on it, getting an A at the end but at the cost of having a happy, non-stressful winter quarter.

The worst part about it is that he tells you that he doesn't curve the class at the start of the quarter, but I sincerely hope that he did (because the exams for my math classes have higher averages and my math classes are still curved). And to rub salt on the wound, he gives less extra credit, proportion-wise, than Virtanen does, but Virtanen has an amazing godlike curve, despite similar grading schemes and exams of comparable difficulty to Salazar's.

...yeah. I just don't have anything to say.

So I think it's pretty clear what my intention is when suggesting whether or not you should take this class with Salazar. But if you ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO, this is what you can do to lessen your pain:

- Learn as many concepts as you can ahead of time. So read through Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9 in Big C++ while reading some of Chapter 7 to know and understand pointers, and make sure that you play around with coding the material covered in those chapters so that the programming makes sense.
- Talk to your TA's for help and questions. They'll be in the PIC lab on certain days of the week to provide homework help and stuff. These guys really do help. I had William and I'd say he was A-OK.
- Know your key terms and the common coding errors, and have an open mind for the weird tricks and stuff that Salazar might pull on his exams. Literally, he can just change the difficulty of a problem with one line of code or one sentence, so like just make sure you are able to write code swiftly and correctly by doing exercises so that you have a sharper intuition as to how to code and stuff.
- And most importantly, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE LOOK AT AND STUDY THE PRACTICE EXAMS AND PRACTICE PROBLEMS IN DEPTH! UNDERSTAND THE SOLUTION FOR EACH PROBLEM AND IF YOU CAN'T DO THAT, ASK THE TA'S OR SOMEONE AROUND YOU. THESE WERE ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL IN HELPING ME GET MY A DESPITE THE SHIT THAT WAS HAPPENING! I can't stress this enough. The practice exams will help you immensely for the actual exams, so don't sleep on them.

So uh yeah. That's basically all I have to say. To all my comrades who were in my class, we did it. It's over. We don't have to worry about it ever again, save for whoever took him for 10B.

P. S. If you've gotten this far, congratulations. Here's something that I think will also help. Salazar's going to mention a little nifty thing at the start of the quarter. So make sure you pay really good attention to that and take detailed notes on "the things that seem like they don't have a purpose in terms of the programming concepts."