OK. I gave this class bad reviews because he isn't a clear professor, and his lectures are all over the place, not helpful, and hurt my brain to sit through. Never the less, I figured out how to do well and I am not a genius / overachiever in all aspects in life, I just care about CS and wanted to do well. This is what you have to do: Read the book. I don't care what other people say, read the book-- if you CAN, do it BEFORE lecture. He jumps all around, and the days I was most confused and went on my phone most were days when I didn't read in advance. When I read in advance, his words in lecture helped extend the detailed textbooks ideas. Textbook is very detailed but AMAZING. they don't try to dumb it down but they take it step by step. Heres what Eggert wants: Someone with Intuition. You DEVELOP this intuition by reading and asking questions. Non stop. There are many times when I never felt clear about a concept but I still was able to score high on a question about the concept. Eggert knows people are always confused in his class. He cares about you having intuition about what the concept it. He cares that you can see a question on a test that is not something you've heard of before, and have the intuition based on your reading to answer the question even without seeing the concept prior. Heres the great thing: ITS AN EQUAL PLAYING FIELD. NO ONES HEARD OF THE CONCEPTS HE BRINGS UP ON THE TEST. there are MANY right answers. YOU need to read the textbook and ask questions in class in order to develop some type of language to use during tests that shows you are at least TRYING to grasp the general idea of concepts in the class, you don't need to know the "right " answer. Even if the answer is wrong, if the intuition is good or backed up by good logic, you WILL get points. Explain as much as you can on the test and you WILL get partial points, and they go a LONG way . also, he never prepares you or teaches you what are in his labs. You need the internet to help you for labs.

There is a LOT to learn from this class. However, a lot of the learning process comes from: First reading the book. Second, understanding his lectures completely (Protip: When he writes his midterms topics are DEFINITELY guaranteed to cover his last 2 lectures during the week. But who knows, he might be reading this now). Thirdly, really understanding his lectures using supplemental material. That means other colleges' websites, notes, slides, stackexchange, stackoverflow, etc. Also the labs aren't completely clear and there are bugs in the labs, but it's nothing too horrible. However, for the amount of effort and the grade I got compared to other classes at UCLA and their curves, it wasn't too bad. Thanks Eggert :)

P.S. I think Eggert personally looks over finals and may consider giving some leeway if you're on the edge between two grades. But I'm not sure, that's what I hear from people anyways.

DISCLAIMER: I got an A in this course, don't judge me.

LECTURES: As told by all the previous reviews, reading the textbook before lectures is essential because Eggert barely went over the important concepts. The lecture notes (handwritten by Eggert on sheets of paper, projected onto the screen) are barely identifiable. Still, try to note down everything that appears on the screen as they may magically appear in exam questions.

DISCUSSIONS: Very helpful. My TA, Shikhar Malhotra, did a great job covering all those materials skipped by Eggert and offered a lot of help for the Labs.

LABS: Doable, but time-consuming. Lab1 and 3 are significantly harder than the other two. The Lab specs has extremely vague wordings; fortunately TAs clarified most of the problems on Piazza.

HOMEWORKS: Easy, but only worth 5% of the grade.

TESTS: Hard. Each test usually consists of 1-3 coding problems and the rest are short-answer problems. The coding problems are straightforward and doable (similar to those appearing under the 'bitwise' tag on Leetcode), but requiring knowledge of the data representations. The short-answer problems are where students lose the majority of their scores. Wording for the problems are often very ambiguous, making it easy to misinterpret the problems and get a lot of scores deduced. There are some very open-ended problems (e.g. "is this computer structure better than that structure? ") with generous offerings of partial credits; there are also problems that are almost impossible to answer because the materials in the book and the lectures are far from sufficient and only Eggert himself knows the answer. Answer 3-4 problems correctly and getting partial credits for the rest would result in a score slightly above median.

THOUGHTS:

Professor Eggert is an extremely smart and talented person. However, his unparalleled understanding of computers is both his strength and his drawback. His expectations of his students are somehow unrealistic compared to his effort put into teaching the fundamental concepts.

Concepts related to computer architecture are often esoteric and abstract: what are virtual memories? How do caches work? What gets popped onto the program stack? What exactly is an I/O stream? What are deadlocks, and what's the difference between semaphores and mutexes? Thus what most students truly need is someone who can walk them through the process slowly and patiently, providing them with the necessary intuitions. However, Eggert assumes the book can do all those "dirty jobs" for him so that he can go on to talk about some extra material. As a result, most students are left in their own confusions after the lectures.

I would not advise against taking Eggert's courses, as they are great indicators of individual intellect. However, throughout this course I learned mostly from the textbook, google, Stackexchange and slides from other colleges' CS departments, not from Eggert himself.

Browsing through the slides for this course's equivalents at other colleges, what I saw were clear pictures and explanations of what's going on inside those computers. I saw animations of program stacks along execution of each line of code; I saw graphs depicting the mapping between virtual memory and RAM; I saw paragraphs of technical explanations, bolstered by handful of practical examples.

Saltiness rises in my heart, as I am starting to doubt whether this course actually paid attention to students' learning experience. I am not a fan of such pedagogy.

The blood, sweat, and tears I had to put in to (probably) scrape by an A was truly excessive. Professor Eggert is a very brilliant man and I look up to him; with his contributions to open source and Linux, it was a pleasure to be taught by such a remarkable human being.

However, his lectures are not exactly the clearest and it gets confusing and dry sometimes. READING THE ASSIGNED READING BEFORE LECTURE IS A MUST. On days I don't, I get lost within 5 minutes of his lecture and there, getting kicked in the dust, steamrolled into confusion. However, if you do approximately understand what's going on in the textbook before you come to class, you will be able to make the connections necessary to understand a particular concept.

Go to discussion and office hours - that's how I was able to at least decently understand the material in general, as they help you clarify the details and such. Swathi was incredible; I wasn't in her discussion but I came to her office hours. She was clear and friendly, and if she's unsure, she won't give the incorrect information by appearing she knows everything; rather she will ask your email and she will take the time to carefully explain the concepts! My TA, Anurag, was pretty good too, as he explains the concepts in an easier manner to grasp.

The tests are insane. I got below the median on the first one and barely above median on the second one. But I but pulled through the final as I took full advantage of the above and pulled a high 80%. Again, please use your resources to your advantage and you won't regret it. The tests will test you on nuances and stuff you have never seen before but able to be solved based on what you learned, so guess and try to write a lot and pray for partial credit.

I honestly slaved away the last 3 weeks of the quarter, seeing the light in the tunnel. So here's something: if you think you might get destroyed in a class, don't lose hope since the final can save you.

What can also save your grade in this class, with the fiery destruction that is the exams? Do well on all your labs, and do your homework! Homework may be 1 percent each but every point counts in case the raw score gets so bunched up together than 1% makes the difference between letter grades.
For labs, try to get a 100 on all. Get help from TA, work with friends, and Google. Also try to get as high of a speed up as you can in the last lab, the OpenMP lab. I got a 2% extra credit (max possible) so that might also saved my grade. This year the highest was 16x speed up so try to aim for that, or higher, if you can.

To the people taking it fall, best of luck to you. Don't lose hope from failing a midterm. It happens, but as long as you score above average in the end, don't worry too much.

I sort of liked this class, mostly because the material was really interesting to me. But it was still incredibly difficult. Without help or a solid study group, you WILL suffer! Always do assignments with your friends so you can figure things out, because Eggert provides little to no instructions. With teamwork and a lot of googling, you can get full credit on every lab. You just have to put in the effort. Discussion can be boring but if you have a good TA, they can be incredibly helpful in explaining material (because Eggert won't), and provide lots of help on Homeworks and Labs. I had Swathi Patnaikuni for my TA and she was the best TA I've had for a CS class so far, so try to get her section if she's available.

Lecture was dry and Eggert raced through the material. I would HIGHLY recommend doing all the assigned reading *before* lecture, because Eggert tends to focus on what he thinks is important. With the background knowledge of the reading, you can fill in holes by yourself and make connections where Eggert otherwise won't. (But he will always stop to answer every question and reexplain things if asked to). Even if it's a lot of reading, you can always break it up between two nights and it only spend 45 minutes each night reading. Also, tests are open book, so it's useful to be familiar with the text so you can find what you're being asked about quickly.

Nothing can really prepare you for tests, he asked about topics on the final that were never mentioned in lecture, and weren't in the book. You kind of just have to write down facts about what you think is related and hope for partial credit. As long as you can rock one test and get around average on the others, you should be fine getting on the good side of the curve.

You may have to take another course like 35L with him in the future, but you'll be used to/prepared for him by then.

Eggert is an incredibly challenging professor. There is a lot of necessary reading and his notes are incredibly messy. Unless you read before you can get lost and he does make mistakes at times that no one corrects him on. You have to be on your stuff in this class. I wouldn't recommend him unless you really want to be challenged, because if you want that then he's your man.

People recommend taking 35L before 33 or at the same time for a reason. For those who complain about 35L materials, if you choose not to take 35L with 33, it's your fault for having to figure out Linux, C and GDB. I agree TAs are bad, but you have to pay the price for not following advices.

Inevitably we ended up with Eggert...

Eggert is very smart, and there's no denying about that. However, his lecture is very very unclear even after reading the textbook before every single lecture. He jumps around topics and mentions that he forgot to cover some material last lecture and suddenly jumps to that.

His exams? Don't even think about doing well on it. There are just a very small portion that is reflective of lecture and book material, and the rest is more of guessing your way through hoping to score points. Averages are high 50's and I would say that the tests are only somewhat fair. There are indeed material we have no idea was covered, that was part of one huge exam question. Perhaps the fact that Eggert writes exams focusing on stuff "he glances or skims through for a few seconds in lecture" is true.

The labs: They are infinitely more difficult than CS31 and 32 labs. We are expected to navigate through C and GDB super well. The time to finish labs is comparable to CS32, if not longer, but at least for CS32, everything is easy. This is plain hard.

I am currently taking this course now so I can't comment on the final, but I just want to say that this is the single biggest factor of making my spring quarter absolutely horrendous and nightmarish. I learned a lot but in a difficult way, so I do give credit to Eggert for making this class difficult so only the brightest of the brightest do well. However, please prepare yourselves for this challenge if you are planning to take it in the future, say fall 2017.

Seriously the worst professor I have ever had in this school(though it's my first year in UCLA..)
1.He requires a crazy amount of reading prior to each lecture(ranging from around 40 pages to around 100 pages). The book is almost all plain text, with very little graphical illustrations, no highlight and no summary. And it's dry and convoluted. But the professor just assumes you read all the stuff in advance and have a very good understanding about it. Otherwise there is no f*cking way you can understand things from his lectures!
2. As I said it's very hard to follow him during his lectures, but the worse part is that it's even harder to go through his lecture materials after class. Unlike Smallberg his lectures are not podcasted and unlike Nachenberg he has no slides. All he does in class is writing down messy and unorganized notes. And when you go back to try to study from your notes, you will just get completely lost!
3.The exams are ridiculously hard and irrelevant to what what we saw and did in the book.
4. Oh and there are the awful labs... Mostly irrelevant to the lectures, and super hard. Honestly it asks you to find and fix bugs in some long and convoluted codes. It also requires you to have a very solid background in C and GDB, non of which we have covered in depth in lectures.
5. The TAs are horrible. Sometimes when you ask questions to the TAs the TAs won't even know the answers. Also the office hours for the TAs are poorly organized. Most of them will have office hours on the same day, or even at the same time period. Sometimes before the midterms or project dues you won't even be able to find a TA for help.
6. Feel like the piazza platform will be more effective if the professor himself can actually participate in answering students' questions:)

In summary, the sloppiest, laziest and most unorganized professor I've ever seen! He absolutely puts no effort in ensuring that students can actually learn from his class. I don't know why people will say they learn much more from Eggert's class??? Feels like I don't learn anything from him(I don't think that's bc I'm too dumb though since I got As in my Maths, Physics and CS31,32 with ease.) So PLZ dooooo avoid him if you can. He will be your absolutely worst nightmare! Trust me!

Professor Eggert is actually one of the worst professors I've had at UCLA. He has terrible lectures that are irrelevant to the reading assigned, and gives tests on subjects that are actually not in the book. Seriously avoid taking any class with him at all costs I hate him with a passion