The professor definitely seemed to try his hardest. He isn’t the best lecturer per se, but if you can understand his accent, his lectures are generally useful. So, I’d go to them. Also, Henary always had extra office hours, which was convenient.

The class is like 20al in terms of rigor, and is basically a watered down combo course of 20b and 30b. That said, the workload is definitely heavy at times, with two lab write ups per week. Also, some labs take rather long to complete, but usually they are fairly interesting.

The class itself is easy; 50%+ of his students get A’s for a reason. During the midterm you’re given all formulas, while during the final you get a one page cheat sheet.

Students only need the lab manual. The other book that isn’t the lab manual is basically useless for this class, and basically a waste of money.

Henary grades like Pang’s 20L class but his lectures aren’t as good though.

Enough said about his accent in other comments. Other than that his lectures are fair and useful for exams. Like every other lab class, the workload of the class is painful even though it is a 4-unit class. Every week you will spend ~5 hours in the lab alone, plus 1 hour in lecture plus ~9 hours for lab reports. I know you will be second-year when you take this class and you will have 22 units, but please do not take full 22 units with this class as I did.

This class is tedious, where the consists of two long lab blocks and continuous lab write-ups over and over which are graded pretty harshly if your numbers are off. This is a majority of your grade and takes up a significant portion of your time. Furthermore, Professor Henary's lectures are extremely difficult to understand, as his accent makes the class almost incomprehensible, if it wasn't for his slides that are more clear. The tests aren't too bad, but the final featured a significant amount of spectra analysis, which if you are not taking Chem 30B alongside or before may prove difficult.

Henary tries to engage the class in his lectures, but honestly, his accent is somewhat hard to understand (you really have to pay attention to pick up on what he's saying). To make up for that though, his lecture slides pretty much give you what you need to know for the midterm/final. He does however tell you some things in lecture that are not on the slides, so be sure to attend lecture to pick up on those things (they definitely show up on the exams!).
The labs themselves are alright, but they were kind of long and tedious (lab twice a week for 3 hrs each). The soil project at the end of the quarter was pretty daunting at first, but as long as you explain what you did in your lab report, you should do pretty well on it (my TA supposedly gave most groups A's on their reports). Overall, it wasn't a bad class - just a lot of tedious work.

I love Professor Henary! He did have extremely heavy accent, and made me frustrating for the first few weeks. However, his English is understandable, and you will get used to it (from the perspective of an international student who is not an expert in English). He explained the concepts very clearly, and he often repeated what he thought is important, and he also spoke slowly, so it's not hard to follow him during the class. His lectures are engaging and inspiring. The pace of the lectures was alright.
His texts came directly from the slides. Midterm was EASY. Final was harder, but was fair and doable. I believed everyone did worse than the midterm, and he curved anyways, so not bad.
Overall, 30AL offered by him was a great class. I prefer Professor Henary over Pang, just because Henary spoke much more slowly than Pang, and his tests were much easier.

Henary's reputation isn't great, but he's actually a pretty good professor. He truly cares about students learning and he always wants more people to come to his office hours. He's pretty lenient in general and isn't a stickler like other chem professors. Our midterm was a bit hard since grading was a bit harsh but the average was around 78% I think and he ends up scaling it in the end so you should be fine as long as you get average. You get a cheat sheet on the final which is amazing since no other chem lab professors let you have one for the final, and it pretty much will let you get a good grade on the final. There's a lot of work for the lab but it's pretty much busy work and it just sucks being in lab for 6 hours a week with multiple prelabs a week sometimes. Still, Henary is a great professor and I would definitely recommend him for 30AL.

The amount of work in this class is absurd at times. Since you have lab twice a week, with a prelab and postlab due each one, there can be up to 4 lab reports due each week. This class just ate up all of my time. I took this class with 22 units and a very spread out schedule. HUGE MISTAKE, I spent so much time working on this class. I recommend going to lectures and recording with a voice recorder as he doesn't record lectures but will tell you what question he is going to put on his midterm. The midterms are not too bad and I think are fair. His lectures are not the easiest to understand at first but you get used to it after a little while. Most of what you might need are going to be on his slides. The final is a mix of some of the concepts you might work on in your postlab along with Spectroscopy problems, alot of them. So definitely don't sleep on that. The soil project is not too bad, we misidentified one of our compound but still got an A on the project.

Alot of this class relies on your TA, a good TA can really make a difference in your experience with the class, and let me say, not all TA's teach the class equally. Some TA's did final review before the final, mine did not. Some TA's prepped their sections for the soil project, mine just threw us to the wolves. Some TA's were lenient graders, mine was not. I lost alot of points for very small infractions on my lab reports. Do not buy the second textbook they tell you is recommended, we only used it once and only 1 page of it, you can get it from other places... or just look up the concept online as its a pretty common technique. Henary did curve in the end, just take my advice for the midterm and final and everything should be alright, just please do not take this with high workload classes as this class basically took up most of my time.

Dr. Henary comes into this class first thing in the morning extremely energetic and ready to teach, which I appreciate but did not have the energy for. His accent makes him a little difficult to understand, but he goes over the material pretty well and is clear about what is going to be on the exams and what will be relevant in the section. He also visits the lab periods semi-frequently and will help during the experiments, which is really nice. The labs themselves aren't too bad, but having two lab periods a week means that there's a good amount of time spent out of class working on the pre-labs and the post-labs. This depends a bit on the TA, but the grading wasn't too harsh and Dr. Henary says that differences in the relative difficulty of TAs is accounted for in final grades. In all, not the worst class, but definitely one that will eat up a bit of your time.

The exams I would say are pretty fair, and most of the material that shows up on an exam is something that you'll be prepared for if you listen for verbal notes in lecture and do the practice exams. The midterm is only work about 8% of the grade, while the final is worth almost 30. They're very manageable and you even get a cheat sheet on the final, but there are a few questions on the midterm that are basically trivia about reagents or procedures done in lab so if you don't remember you're just screwed. There's also a soil project (a group project about separated organic and inorganic compounds) doesn't show up in the syllabus so it's unclear how much of the grade it's worth, but it was graded really leniently so as long as your group does some work it shouldn't negatively tank your grade.

I think the class overall was pretty fun but the workload can feel a little overwhelming. The grading is made up of mostly lab reports, a midterm, a final, and a project. The lab reports are graded somewhat strictly (similar to chem 20L) and can feel a little overwhelming since there were two labs a week. However, it was still pretty manageable. The midterm was worth about 8% of our grade so it isn't too stressful, but I would definitely still recommend studying for it because there's a good amount of memorizing on the midterms and the average was pretty low at 73%. The soil project itself was pretty tedious as the objective was separating a soil sample over the course of 4 lab periods with your own proposed plan. There's not too much guidance so there's a lot of problem solving and creative thinking but it was honestly pretty fun with the right group. For the final (worth 27%), you're given a two sided cheat sheet so as long as you have a good cheat sheet, the final isn't too difficult. Average was 78%.

I liked 30AL, looking back I think a lot of the labs covered experiments that were interesting and useful to know (separation/extraction, purification, TLC, ion-column, a bit of analyzing spec). Taking this class with/after 30B is helpful for the units on mass spec, IR, and NMR, which had a couple of dry-labs dedicated to those concepts. Like all lab classes, your experience depends highly on your TA.

The lab reports are more frequent than 20L, but seem to be a bit shorter in length, which is nice. The independent experiments aren't too bad, but I was definitely pressed for time on one or two of them. Soil lab was very doable, but it does help if you know someone who took the class before.

I found the midterm/final to be a little difficult/tricky, despite the midterm being open-notes and the final getting a cheat sheet. However, the class is pretty doable, interesting, and it's not too hard to get an A.