The final exam just does not make any sense. The professor tries to be like Paul Eggert but fails hardly and makes the class much worse than Eggert's. Eggert's final exam at least allows us to use all notes and books, but professor Rosario only allows one cheat sheet and gives us questions randomly pulled from enormous amount of lecture slides. I don't think the final exam is very helpful as a recap of what we have learned during the quarter and is extremely difficult. I can say it is more difficult than Eggert's. Eggert teaches cs131 pretty good btw.

Let me write the most accurate review of this class ever. Ryan R Rosario (RRR) is a "wannabe". He want's to be a top tier CS lecture like the ones before him: Paul Eggert, Junghoo Cho, David Smallberg etc. But, he falls terribly short of his lofty goals. Deep down, I like to think he means well. But this is not at all evident from his demeanor.

His lectures are dull and uninspiring. He straight up reads from his slides. To give him credit, his slides are well made. But there can be parts which are unclear and could use an example and RRR does a decent job of expanding on these parts in lecture and during office hours. It is also possible to understand the confusing bits using several online aides such as StackOverflow or by simply asking a friend to help you out. The other main draw for his lecture is that not everything in his slides will show up on the final exam or are required. This cannot be easily determined by the student. Topics that seem advanced and beyond the scope of an introductory database systems course will APPEAR on the exams. RRR does NOT like it when students ask him for clarification on topics. He expects you to attend lectures and pay attention to what he highlights to be important. This is understandable, after-all this is the point of lecture. But we are students in a very competitive and high-work load major: Computer Science. We stay up late completing projects against deadlines. We may miss a lecture for personal reasons. Even then, to be fair, the professor is NOT required to re-clarify what's covered on the lecture. But when a TA goes rogue and stars listing topics that RRR said was not important, butchers explanations of questions and gives up mid-discussion and begins conversing with herself in a foreign language (क्या? @ स्वाति शर्मा) then the least RRR can do is clarify what topics will be on the exams and provide explanations on practice questions. But, he FAILS to do this. Instead, he harasses stressed out students during finals week. One such instance taken from Piazza:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To quote him "I'm not sure at which school or department the professor isn't the one writing the final. I will not be providing a list of topics. I've made it very clear in lecture after lecture what I feel is important and what I don't feel is important. If students chose to not attend ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When a student calls him out for being "vindictive", RRR deanonymizes him and publicly calls him out for doing so. This is serious violation of rights and should be reported to the dean of students.
Don't worry it does not end there. When students confronted his attitude on reddit this is what happened. RRR called a random Redditter to be someone from his class. Over reacted to a comment against him by reporting the "alleged" Redditer to the police. He also described some psychopathic policies he has implemented in the course.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When I see the same name pop up on Piazza, I reach for my photo roster and usually it's "yep, never seen that person."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(The Reddit post has not been linked. But can be found by searching through u/LADataJunkie/)
That is weird! No we students are not entitled. If anything, we are stressed and just trying to get by. Please try to empathize. RRR is accomplished and hardworking but so are we!

The projects are not that bad but we had to repeatedly seek assistance on Piazza for his specs. The second did take some time as it had some ML work but it is impossible to make a project in which no student has experience in and is fair to all. The first project is a cake walk if you have web development experience. The specs could use more work. Smallberg, Nachenberg and Eggert all have better specs. You don't learn much from projects.

The grading for this class is NOT SPOT ON. RRR does not allow regrades beyond a certain date for projects (this is sometimes just 12hrs, how are we supposed to check myUCLA every 12 hrs?) and does not allow regrades on exams.

The final was ridiculous. Hardest final I have taken at UCLA. It was incredibly hard but that is not something to complain about. The one thing I have against it is that we were not prepared to handle an exam of that caliber. If we received more practice exams and assistance from the instructors it would have been much smoother. Midterm was long but not nearly on the same ball park as the final.

He curves the final based on what he thinks should have been the average score. So if thought the median should be a 60 and it was a 40, tough luck cause everyone who got a median score gets a C- on the final! The median on the final was 42 and that was a C- for Spring 2019.

With all this said, it seems to me that RRR has a need to feel respected and validated by his students. But I don't really get why! RRR is accomplished and established and there is no reason for him to come give back to UCLA unless he really wants to.

RRR is kind and helpful during his office hours but caters quite a bit to students who are trying to slide in to an internship at his workplace, Google. Some of the questions students ask are plain stupid and are just there to get to know him better and hopefully get an internship referral. Its pretty nasty but CS students do steep that low for internship. Oh yeah, there is also an RRR cheer team on Piazza that upvotes everything he says (even the nasty, rude and sarcastic responses). I suspect these are the same kids that are trying to get a recommendation from him.

In short, don't take his class. If you do, go to all lectures, office hours and practice everything on the slides. Do not rely on RRR to always help you out.

I will defer judgement of the academic rigors of RRR's class to other bruinwalk reviews. But, I will comment on the temperament, and attitude that RRR holds.

To put it lightly, Rosario is not the most socially aware. He engages in typical micro-aggressions that seep through many, if not most, of his comments about the class and the us, the students. Often blunt and only thinking about his own ego, Rosario makes sweeping claims against both his students as a whole and specific individuals. He personally attacked various students on Piazza (even when they wanted to remain anonymous), and made it his personal goal to vindicate his own class.

Rosario depicts himself as the victim, but any rational human can see he is anything but. I don't think UCLA should support employees with his demeanor, attitude, and view on education. It reflects extremely poorly on the university and his employment should be re-thought.

I was very excited to take this class. I usually don't take 8am classes but I made an exception because I really wanted to learn from an industry veteran and was promised to learn modern database technology like NoSQL. Sadly, Ryan Rosario is the most egotistical and childish professor I have ever had. He likes to pretend that he is really helpful by responding to every Piazza question, but most of the time his responses are contradictory, purposely vague, or purposely rude. Rosario picks favorites hard, the students that go this office hours to try and get an internship (because he works at Google) are the only ones in the class that he is nice to. Then to the rest of the class he is just snarky and rude, no matter how genuine someone's question is. He will respond to questions like "The TA said this will be on the final, but you said it won't be, which topics will be on the final?" with responses like "You are entitled and should show up to lecture." He even admits to looking at his photo roster for every piazza so he can respond differently depending on if he's seen their face in lecture before (As an aside, some people like to sit in the back of class, how can he expect to know the face of everyone who shows up to class?). He then proceeded to ban me from Piazza (for calling him out for being rude to students with genuine questions) and claims to have reported me to the police. He gets so personally offended that people don't attend his boring PowerPoint 8am lecture. We are all busy students, who probably all stay up late to finish projects, there are legitimate reasons to miss lecture. Obviously skipping every lecture is pretty unexcusable, but his attitude on Piazza doesn't encourage anyone to attend and support him.

As for logistics, this class is more frustrating than productive. To give Rosario some credit, the late policy is kind (4 late days to use throughout the quarter, 2 per project) even though it is worded confusingly in the syllabus. Some of the projects were kinda fun, although I only really learned in one of the four. The breakdown of the projects is as follows

1A: literally just making a schema. Extremely basic, took me maybe 5 minutes, somewhat arbitrary spec ("choose what types you feel appropriate) but I'm pretty sure everyone got like 100%.
1B: Make a song searching web page using Flask and PostgreSQL. This was the only useful and fun project throughout the class. Perfect project, that I think there is no reason to change (except maybe clarify the spec slightly)

2A: Making a python script that parses reddit comments into clean tokens, with a couple more requirements. In theory this is easy as hell (maybe like 5 regex expressions?) but the spec was horribly confusing and unclear and had a lot of "use your best judgment." If this is graded automatically, I want objective feedback. To make matters worse, they provide a sanity checkng tool that DIDN'T WORK ON SIMPLE TEST CASES. This led to a million piazza posts of confusion with TAs saying to follow the tool and Rosario saying that they won't test on complicated things so don't worry about it. It was a complete mess. I know Rosario has the capability to make a better sanity check tool (seriously the errors in this felt like they had to be coded in intentionally) so I wonder what went wrong here? Plus this only feels vaguely relevant to the class.
2B: this project was a big data assigment with some light machine learning. I can confidently say that I did not learn a single thing from this assignment. It was basically just copy pasting code either from the spec or from stack overflow. Debugging was actually impossible, because the amount of data took hours (over 4 hours on my gaming PC) to load. Theres also no warning of how the code will take on the spec, so I had to turn in the project late due to being caught off guard from this (my fault I suppose). This project was neither fun nor useful and was a signficant step up from the rest of the relatively quick projects.

The projects were only worth 20% of the grade, and the biweekly homeworks (which were incredibly hard, even if you had the book and the lectures slides next to you) were worth 15%. And then there's the tests...

I didn't take the midterm because I had a conflict. Rosario said I could take the test at another time, but then never told me when my make up test was supposed to be, and then blamed me for not asking him when it would be. So I was instead left with a final that was worth 65% of my grade.

The final was the single hardest test I've ever taken at UCLA. It tested you on a ton of random concepts that only appeared in like two slides max. All of the topics that seemed the least important and were rushed over in class were here, along with none of the topics that were covered on the projects or the interesting ones. The topics we were expected to know were frankly unfair. For example, there was a free response question on writing a query in MongoDB. There was literally one slide on the javascript interface in the entire class, and we never once used to were expected to know javascript during the rest of the class. Whenever I looked around during the test everyone was just staring at the ceiling. I don't think there was a single person who wrote an answer for everything on the test.

Unless Rosario has a complete change of heart (which doesn't seem likely), don't take this class. And since Rosario hates me so much for calling him out and doesn't understand why people don't attend his class, he is probably reading this review. So my message to Mr.Rosario is here: I don't hate you, but I just think that your class not only set up many students and me for failure and was frankly frustrating. You need to learn how to take criticism and not be so childish. You shouldn't just assume students are being entitled, and recognize that students not only have legitimate reasons to not attend class and also have legitimate questions and concern that you shouldn't get mad about. Obviously, as the professor you have power over all of us, but try to be considerate next time you teach. You have the capacity to be a great professor, but you are letting your ego get in the way.

Rosario is a straight up clown.

lead singer of smash mouth leaves band to mountain bike and bully students

This class was unnecessarily chaotic. Our “midpoint quiz” was supposed to be a simple diagnostic test but ended up being more complicated and ambiguous in description than any of my actual midterms. The easier (and clearest) questions were filled with trivia like “Who invented [something random here]” or “What is x?” given JavaScript code, having no relevance to actual web application knowledge and reminiscent of an alternate reality where CS31 is taught in JavaScript.

The professor would also do something sneaky about the projects. He would set up a poll at 11 PM a day before the project was due asking if the deadline should be extended, and then make a decision within 1-3 hours. Given that the only people active on Campuswire were those still working on the project, the deadlines were extended for another week (2 out of 3 times). We were supposed to have 5 projects, beginning with HTML/CSS and finishing with a full-stack application using a framework like React, but because of this, we ended up only doing 3 projects (4th one being optional and assigned Week 9 Thursday), and the scope of them was HTML/CSS/JavaScript with no framework at all. Project 4 does introduce Express/MongoDB, but introducing backend in a web app class at the end of Week 9 is concerning.

Onto the projects themselves, they were very doable, but the ambiguous specs made them stressful because it was often unclear what he wanted. It did not help that the professor usually responded with some variation of “Follow the spec.” (at first) and you could not ask the TAs any project-related questions because he would gatekeep the grading rubric from them.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Project 1:
- He wanted us to write about 3 significant features of HTML and CSS, anything not covered in lecture, but the slides had pretty much everything important to these languages, so we had to put something esoteric or tangential to HTML/CSS to get points.
- This project was graded wrong for everyone. Upon regrade request, my score went from 87% to a 100%.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Project 2:
- There was heavy debate about what he meant by “No description”, and this was never clarified until after the due date.
- We were supposed to use Google Cloud, but it was impossible to set up based on the instructions.
- Points were lost for not making the final product screenshot, despite it being outdated. Things like removing the default cards, not using sans-serif font, and/or adding new features could get you to lose 10 to 30 points out of 100, even if you met all the functional requirements in the spec.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Project 3:
- Doing one of the extra credits from Project 2 prevented you from doing the one in Project 3, leading to unfairness in scores.
- We were supposed to fix linting and console errors, but the “io” 404 / linting error had different behavior locally and on GCloud, so it would be impossible to solve it on both, leading to hours of wasted time and frustration. Keep in mind this was on instructor-provided code.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Overall, I would not recommend this professor for first-time/revived courses, given his stubbornness towards grading, unclear specs he will not rewrite, and terrible pacing. It sucks that this is his legacy, because he is a great lecturer, and curves overall grades well.

Be prepared to sift through hundreds of slides of information only to be tested on random topics that are relevant for half a lecture. Rosario is an interesting guy and he knows a lot about the subject, but doesn’t know how to make a meaningful connections between what’s given in assignments/projects, and the exams. If you’re looking for an easier upper div elective, this is NOT the class for you! He’s purposefully vague on Piazza and forbids TAs from releasing practice questions. it’s caused lots of controversy with students. (Why even have piazza if you aren’t going to answer students questions?) In my experience I haven’t seen a professor this uncommitted to helping students.

A lot of information, very modern/relevant material and applications. Assignments were honestly fun to do, tests were hard but curved fairly. Professor clearly cares about teaching and making sure students succeed in the long run. The old reviews no longer paint an accurate image of the course. Highly recommend!

The lectures get old really fast. He's engaging sometimes, but the slides are way too long (avg 100 slides per lecture) and he goes through them too fast. I wouldn't mind if each slide was succinct, but they're not. They contain a lot of useless information that only makes studying worse because he doesn't tell you what's on the midterm and final. Taking notes for this class feels like a chore and studying is just annoying.