Alex is very organized in lectures and project specs, and is also extremely responsive on Piazza. He genuinely cares about his students. Projects and exams are not easy but if you score slightly above the median on exams and do well on projects you can get an A-. I didn't read textbook at all and only relied on lecture + slides. Though projects were tough, I enjoyed doing them more than projects in cs111 with Eggert, and I also prefer his teaching style over Eggert's. Alex is a cool guy and I would take another class with him if I could.

One of the best classes I've taken at UCLA. Very interesting topic, very engaging professor. He makes sure you know all the material. He is also always online on Piazza answering any questions you might have, so that is great. The projects can be very time consuming, but they help you understand the material much much better, and I found them enjoyable to do too.

If you get the chance to take this class with Professor Afanasyev, I highly recommend it.

Alex works very very hard to give us nice looking spec website and answers many questions on piazza in time. He is really a nice person. He also posts many extra credit challenges to help us understand more about some important concepts.

However, I do have a few complaints about him.
1. I don't really like his lecturing style. It's an 8am class, which is already bad, and he hasn't done much to keep my attention. In class, people either have no clue about what's going on or know the materials he covered in class before lectures. He taught this class already last year, but it seems that he still reuses old slides without fixing errors / typos.

2. Specs are nice looking, but lack details. Sometimes, I even think those specs are more Eggert-ish than Eggert specs. Plus, in an Eggert class, TAs will provide enough detail for head start. In this class, however, 35L horror reemerges. I spent dozens of hours studying online to understand what TAs can go over in 2 hours, and the results are of course worse. With fewer hours working on the actual project, we don't really have time to better structure, clean up, improve algorithms, etc. of a project.

3. Exams are not very good. It requires more memorization than understanding. I start to miss Eggert exams.

Alex is a great professor! He gives engaging lectures with slides, and he is really passionate about teaching this class. He's very active answering questions on Piazza. There were 3 projects, 2 of which were with a group of 3, and they were very difficult. The tests are also very difficult. There are also short weekly homework assignments.

I really liked Professor Afanasyev. I don't think I've ever had a professor who seemed so deeply knowledgable about the material as this professor did. He tried his best to explain things in different ways if we had trouble understanding the first time.

I think my only complaint is that his lectures could get extremely dry towards the end of the quarter, as the material got more difficult. He reads directly from the slides and as such, it's easy to get complacent and skip class in favor of just reading the book. I didn't mind going to lecture, but I would have loved to have slightly more engaging lectures rather than just direct lecture from slides.
I loved the guest speakers he brought in—they were also quite interesting.

Homework assignments were decent and usually well specified, but the projects often much to be desired in terms of specificity. The requirements would often change as students asked more questions, and many things were left "intentionally ambiguous" but only caused us angst in terms of getting the project done correctly. Grades on homework assignments were delivered quickly and gradescope made it easy to get feedback, but we didn't get project grades quickly at all, and as such it was impossible for us to know if we were being graded fairly on the project before the end of the quarter.

Overall I enjoyed the class, and I think many of the negatives are only because it was the professor's first time teaching this class.