Had taken CS 31 and CS 32 virtually with Smallberg. He does not usually use slides, he sometimes writes codes in Word, and the lectures can get boring. BUT STILL, he's an absolute legend and a wonderful man. Let's boost this man's rating.

Smallberg is a legend. I'm just here to add to the abundance of reviews for this beautiful man.

Though Smallberg was quite slow on grading (thanks to his dual 31/32 teaching workload), he was an effective and thorough lecturer. Overall the content was far more interesting than CS 31, with the homeworks and projects not being terribly difficult (concept wise). Since the content pacing was kind of slow, reading Nachenberg's slides helped a lot. Project 3 was a huge time suck, but good enough planning (and starting early) made it mostly manageable in the end. Due to COVID, the midterms were a weird single question format, and the final was made no-harm (though it was significantly harder than the midterms). TAs and LAs were helpful and responsive. Good luck!

小宝讲课用来学习，南宝讲课用来下饭

A lot of people were ragging on him for being slow with grading this quarter (Spring 2020), but objectively that's a pretty minor consideration when you're evaluating the effectiveness of a professor. Smallberg teaches the class very well. As a lot of reviews have already said, he's not the most engaging lecturer due to how much he pores over the details, but if you pay attention, you'll find that he really does such a good job explaining concepts. I always came out of lecture understanding a new topic pretty well.
There's obviously a lot of complaints about the workload, which does get pretty heavy after week 6. But it's NOT unmanageable. Yes, Project 3 is extremely tedious and does take 20-30 hours to complete, but we get two weeks to do it. If you plan properly, you'll be fine. Smallberg was actually lenient this quarter and gave a relatively easy Project 4, and yet people still love to complain.
Honestly I don't get all the hate Smallberg gets. This dude works harder than any professor I've ever had. He designs unique projects each quarter for CS32, and that means he also has to come up with new test cases every time. Grading in this class is a more intense process than others, so it's obviously going to take longer than other classes to get grades back.
Overall, I would definitely recommend this class with Smallberg. I never attended Nachenberg's lectures so I can't give a comparison, but I will say that this class with Smallberg taught me a lot, and is a very valuable class to have under your belt.

I actually thought I did okay until the final grade was posted, but my only real issue with this class was that the exams were just nothing like we were prepared for. Maybe that was my mistake, but the entire final was on big O and sorting algorithms, which I see why is important, but I was wholly not expecting the entire exam to be on it. Still, I think that the class does its job, which is to weed out the students not capable of doing CS, while it could be me, I will keep on going and hopefully not fail out of this major.

Smallberg is literally amazing. He just exudes niceness. And he seems to know everything. And he's absolutely outstanding at explaining things. And he's super helpful with difficult projects. And he's willing to talk about anything else in computer science you might want to talk about. And he literally explained data structures and algorithms so well I feel like its become ingrained in my brain. And the course material is so well organized. And.. need I go on. Even though I got caught up in the Nachenberg hype as first (he is pretty good though to be fair), Smallberg is way better. Smallberg rocks!!!
(Seriously this is not meant to be a joke in anyway Smallberg is actually amazing. I highly highly highly recommend this class with him. Or any class with him. Just take all the classes you can get with him.)

Overall, despite the incredibly slow grading and lack of clarity behind the grading scheme which we were not given until the week 10, Smallberg is incredibly knowledgable in C++. Granted I hope the world never goes into chaos mode as it did during not only the beginning but the latter half of spring quarter, Smallberg continued to be fairly understanding. I won't lie I thought this class was incredibly difficult, even as I attended every lecture I felt as though I had no basis to start some homeworks and most projects (project 3 ..). However Proj3 is actually graded really generously with lots of room to earn points without completing every bit of the project. His lectures can feel dry and not the most engaging, but I have without a doubt learned so much in this course that I am incredibly glad I took it.
*for reference I am not a CS major so this class was out of my general interest

Flatulants on the road
Ghostracers chasing lost souls
Got myself a coffee
Spilled some on my shirt

USC grads make no dollars
I and Carey are bad spellerz
Memory leak is wrong wrong wrong
For this project, you do not need to submit a report. You're welcome.

Just here to boost lil berg's stats.