This class is overall pretty straightforward. If you are CE or ECE you'll probably do better than the coddled CS kids. Honestly don't understand the immense amount of hate the prof got. It was maybe a little unclear at times but the pacing was very slow and manageable and the concepts were simple. If you just show up and semi pay attention you should get a B+ at the absolute minimum. Her slides are the most useful resource for her tests. Understand each one fully and you will be fine, which shouldn't be too hard as she averages 10 minutes per slide.

this class sucks

To be honest, I didn't attend many of the class lectures. However, I did fine by doing all the assigned reading (which was a bit heavy but the textbook is interesting) and checking the slides to review the important topics. The lectures I did attend were interesting, but I had trouble paying attention because her voice is a bit quiet at times. However, you can definitely tell that the professor knows what she's talking about. Sometimes she tells funny stories, too!

The homework questions are sometimes a bit vague, but the TAs do a good job of clarifying on Piazza. The homework assignments also took varying amounts of time, but none of them were too long. I thought the projects were really useful for learning about networking concepts. We got to have a group (1-3) for the second project, which was time consuming to debug but overall fine.

For the midterm, you should be fine as long as you understand the slides and how to do the homework. I'm not sure about the final because we were allowed to opt-out due to COVID-19.

i've genuinely never felt like a professor wanted us to fail more than Zhang.

the good:
- hw assignments weren't terribly long but gave you good practice on the material. TA's would clarify any confusion on Piazza pretty quickly
- project 1 was somewhat enjoyable? project 2 kinda sucked but I did learn a lot while doing it so there's that
- prof is super knowledgeable about networking and will occasionally share interesting stories about her time working on it. read her wikipedia page if you have the time it's kinda crazy

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the bad:
- the quizzes were CRAZY. there were 3, 15 minute timed quizzes throughout the quarter. the first one was just hard. the second one, people realized they could cheat because it was online and you could just leave the lecture hall to take it. as a result, a bunch of people (understandably) complained so the third quiz was printed on one side of an A4 sheet in size 7 font. there was no place to put your name, or uid, or even mark your answers! I missed a full fill in the blank question because it was hidden in a full paragraph of text with no indication next to it. Also, each quiz is a full 5% of your grade.

- slides often had mistakes and would not be updated on bruinlearn

- i usually attend all of my lectures, but i could not bear to attend zhang's lectures. she'll either drawl on and on about the most trivial, uninteresting component of TCP fast-retransmit with cumulative acknowledgements that won't be tested on and no student could possible hope to remember, or she will blaze through the necessary clarifying examples stating that they are obvious. to make it better, she'll get mad at students on piazza for asking questions about her slides! at least she's responsive on piazza I guess?

- logistics are so unclear. where will the final be? what materials are allowed on exams? what will even be tested? I found out the night before that 1.5 full lectures just wouldn't be tested on. LOL

- one time, a student sneezed during lecture so she went, "oh it's okay he wasn't paying attention anyways" and laughed at him. the ironic part was, he was actually taking notes while I was 20 minutes deep on my twitter timeline right next to him while my friend was desperately trying to secure 3 stars on his angry birds level.

- she'll frequently grandstand about how the goal of students should be to learn, not to secure an A in the class. that's fair enough, but then she'll implement anti-pedagogical practices and policies while flaming students. i am still amazed at how she believes a 15 minute timed quiz packed to the brim with concepts, some of which were the same day the quizzes were administered (!!!!) is a great way to maximize student learning.

- they won't give you any practice materials. I understand the reluctance to give past finals, but the teaching staff won't even create let alone refer to you any resources to practice the material. their argument for why they don't do this is that they want you to "understand the material not practice specific problems." This is completely ridiculous because if you only offer a few homework questions, students will only learn how to do problems like those instead of being able to learn from a wide variety of them. The class is an absolute affront to pedagogy.

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some piazza bangers:
https://imgur.com/a/Vp4CVgh

118 has some pretty cool material. Didn't know how the internet worked before. Kind of do now. Zhang was clearly trying, but she came off as a bit disconnected. Her self-proclaimed teaching philosophy was to teach to inspire and to impart general concepts of protocol design that would be applicable to us. In practice, exams, particularly quizzes would focus on knowing how to manually do calculations involving the specifics of things brushed over quickly in class. What made these feel unfair was that these were typically new types of problems, which combined with short time periods, made them very frustrating to solve under pressure. While she was eager to answer questions, her responses could often come off as unhelpful or even smug. She loved to just ask back "what do you think?", which is pretty unhelpful. She would also get annoyed about test-specific questions, making statements dismissing what would be covered on tests. She was pretty flexible in arranging office hours and seemed pretty eager to share extra material she found interesting (random networking videos, the feynman lectures??). While I learned a lot, I just wish the class less emphasis on testing random calculations, and perhaps more projects related to networking.

Favorite paraphrased quotes:
"What are humans good for? Making mistakes".
"Are you children? Should I make and pass out cookies to you instead?"
"Which TA said that? Some of the TA's are doing better than others"
"The quiz is open-note, not open Chat-GPT!!!" (5 minutes into a 15 minute quiz)
"the only conclusion I can get on why I keep getting test-related questions is that your cache is full and you need to evict something. But as far as I know, human memory is infinite"

Professor Zhang was great! She is incredibly qualified and all of her lectures are incredibly informative.

People who say she was confusing or didn't give enough logistical information are simply lazy - all information was presented multiple times in lectures and on Piazza very clearly, and people just chose to check neither of those and cry instead.

This quarter seemed pretty similar to past quarter in terms of difficulty. The midterm median was ~70. I did about median, and I personally thought it was a pretty doable midterm. There was a "trick question" where you're screwed if you misread the problem. Other than that, it was pretty straight forward. The final median was 80. It was more difficult than the midterm. There was a pretty tricky question involving QUIC, but everything else was very straight forward.

There were 2 projects for the class. The first project was an HTTP server that was the same as past quarters. The second project was a new one for this quarter that replaced parts of the old reliable transport/congestion control project with a new part about security. Since the project was new, there was also a lot of hiccups for the TA/LAs. For example, the autograder was released pretty late in the quarter with 1.5 weeks left until deadline. If there wasn't an autograder I would've definitely not been able to fully debug everything. Other than that, it was a straight forward project. I read the textbook's chapter about security and it gave me all the background I needed on the security side of things. The grading was also initially very binary, but in the end the TA/LAs graded the projects manually to award partial credits.

Overall it was a good class. Professor Zhang had a strong passion and deep knowledge of the internet and the human institutions/constructs that operates it. I appreciated the hands-on projects of the course.

Fun fact: Professor Zhang had a "Saddam Hussein ID card" style playing card for herself: https://www.businessinsider.in/54-women-who-rocked-the-tech-world/lixia-zhang-ucla-professor/slideshow/46224954.cms

Apparently a very controversial take but ngl Prof Zhang is great. she knows her stuff so well and has been around networking absolutely forever, all the way back to foundational first generation work at Berkeley when they were just starting everything. it’s frankly crazy she’s still teaching undergrads at all, but she’s a wealth of knowledge. not an easy class by any means but if you’re someone who already knows a bit about networking and want a great depth, this would be the class and prof for you!

this class is complete garbage. i've had the whole spectrum of cs professors at ucla and zhang is among the worst. she is overall rude, condescending, and pretty terrible at lecturing. as noted in an earlier review, the most bizarre moment of the quarter for me was when a student sneezed in class and she publicly called him out and said he wasn't paying attention. shout out Xinyu Ma and Boyan Ding for being the only two active TAs on piazza, would not have made it through this class without them. can't say anything about the curve/if there even was one because we never got scores back for the last hw or for the final.

some screenshots from the absolute lawless dumpster fire that was our class piazza: https://imgur.com/a/aiVIfu1

Just ask people who took this class my quarter. It was not a fun time :(