Lowkey class was a joke. The professor taught this course as if we were bill gates. His lectures were flat out useless and it did not help on the hw's. The only benefit this class had for me was being exposed to coding before actually taking cs31.
His homeworks were far too lengthy and his graders graded harshly with little explanation as to why points would be taken off. He would take days to respond to emails so communication lacked. The lectures simply did not help on the hw at all
He gave no preparation for the midterm, only three multiple choice questions bruh. His midterm and finals were extremely conceptual and worded in the most complicated way possible. If you do not know how to code, or you want to learn, do not take PIC bruh just do cs.
Overall, Professor Murray is a nice guy but the way he taught was an L

Toughest introductory class you will take if you have this professor. Seems like the average on every homework is around 70 or 75, and mind you homework is worth 50% of your overall grade. Midterm was horrible as well. Midway through the day before the midterm he FINALLY posted practice questions. Except there were only THREE.

Our homeworks are much lengthier and more difficult than the other PIC classes. My friend has typically two problems for week, meanwhile we usually have 3 and sometimes even 4. He is flexible in extending the homework, usually by a day, but it is still very stressful.

The class is extremely disorganized and all over the place. The syllabus is a joke, with barely anything on it so for many things you go in blind.

Class uses campuswire to communicate with TAs and Prof instead of email for the most part.
This I actually liked as it was much easier to get questions answered and also see the questions other classmates had asked.

In lecture, clarity is very hit or miss. Often I feel he gets ahead of himself and will use terms before explaining what they are. In addition, lecture notes, while helpfully very detailed, are disorganized and can be hard to read.

tldr; don't take this class if you have never coded before, prof is disorganized, grades harshly, assigns a lot, lacks clarity.

I joined this class a little under a week in, but felt that it was a pretty good introductory class. I didn't have much past experience in coding outside of some introductory Java, and thought the workload was manageable. The homeworks could be a little tricky at times because the test cases (unreleased) used by the grader were more difficult and not explicitly listed in the instructions, but the exams were fair. I don't believe he's going to be teaching at UCLA anymore, but Professor Murray was a great instructor! He definitely wants his students to learn and succeed, and it shows in the effort he puts into teaching and answering students' questions.

Although I took AP CSA in high school, that was my only prior coding experience and I did not know C++ before this class. There was still a learning curve just because the homework assignments were more challenging, but he was always open in office hours and the lowest one gets dropped (Make sure your code works on Visual Studio so you don't get a 0). TA Nikunj Sanghai was very helpful too. The grading did feel a bit mysterious on homework (50% of your grade) but that's probably on me for not making up enough test cases and basing my code off of the examples in the spec (not hard coded, don't hard code).

The professor clearly wants his students to succeed in overcoming the learning curve. Expect your BruinLearn page to be laden with lecture notes, code examples, and TA notes. I would recommend the textbook as well. Lecture attendance is not mandatory (this was an 8 AM), but you will miss out on the helpful diagrams tracing the code. I got a 79 on the midterm but a 94 on the final, so it is possible to improve. Especially if this is your first time coding, you may feel stuck on topics like pointers, but the teaching team and tutoring services understand and are always there to help you out.

Going into this class with no prior experience in programming definitely required a steep learning curve. However, after many office hours and youtube videos outside of class, I can definitely say that I have a good grasp on c++ material. Professor Murray's lectures were very helpful, but you definitely need supplementary material if you haven't worked with programming before. The homework is worth 50% of your grade which is really nice as the tests were very difficult.

I had him for PIC 10B Fall 2022 and PIC 16A Winter 2023. Professor Murray is a very helpful and patient person and super accessible through office hours and campuswire. His class setup for PIC 16A is much better than his PIC 10B and I think that's partially because he's more experienced in teaching the course (iirc, I am probably the first PIC 10B class he teaches at UCLA). Therefore I do see how that might affect his previous ratings there, but he has gotten a lot better. His homework can be quite challenging some of the time (might take up to 4-6 hours for me and I think I'm moderately good at the materials), but it helps in the exams. The exams can be quite conceptual, which requires you to provide definitions to the terms, but you're allowed to have one letter paper size cheatsheet handwritten front and back in the exam. There's also filling in the missing code part and the predicting output part, all quite straight forward. I think overall it's not hard to get an A in his class, and he does provide good materials in lectures.

He was pretty accommodating (gave extensions on homeworks, open-internet tests bc of COVID) but I think the worst thing about this class was the difficulty of the homework. They were much more complex than the examples given during lectures, which made them very hard to understand as a beginner coder. He was nice, but I definitely wouldn't take his class again.

This class was my second attempt at trying 10A (dropped some other prof's class Week 2 Fall 2021) and it still wasn't easy, but I got through with it with an A. Definitely needed tons of help and I attended most office hours, both my TA's and the Prof's. This was his first time teaching this course so we gave him a lot of feedback, and I think the class will be more doable in other quarters. The midterm and final were fine, but the homeworks were sort of awful. Most of us had no idea where to start with the homeworks until we went to office hours; he gave us more hints at the end of the quarter for the homeworks, but I still struggled a bit. He adjusted homework due dates and hints according to how much we struggled, which was pretty nice. He's a nice person and was super helpful during in-person office hours!