His organization for each lecture is absolutely incredible. Each set of slides is always posted beforehand, recordings are uploaded, and notes are always posted afterwards. Should any student feel unconfident about information that is covred in class, it is so easy to go back and re-watch anything or look at the many resources posted to understand. Rosario also works closely with his TAs and creates really intentional homeworks, which makes the learning experience for this class so much better. I do think he lectures a little bit too fast and covers too much information, kind of expecting studetns to get it on the first time he mentioned it if he says it just once. It seems that he really understands students in a refreshing way that isn't seen with most other professors, however his teaching style definitely caters towards the type of people who hear one thing once and remember it completely making it kind of hard to keep up. That being said, this class isnt meant to be easy, and I think thats really clear -- you can still learn a lot even if you perform well. The other thing is that he is a really strict grader ... for someone who seems to try and come off as understanding to students his strict policies on regrades and grading in general kind of distance this idea that he cares about his students.

I cannot stress enough how terrible an individual this excuse for a professor is.

Rosario is a good, dare I say, great professor. I don't know what Rosario these other reviews had when he taught this course. His lectures are full of dense information but he manages to weave in humor and enlightening analogies to make the content digestable. His exams are straightforward and there are no curveballs, his lecture slides contain everything he will test you on. I would take this class again, learned a lot about a wide array of topics concerning databases, which applies to pretty much every CS field. He truly cares about his students and provides them with an abundance of resources to succeed in this class.

The top review here mentions Rosario wanting to be like Eggert. Well, he is not Eggert. He's not a particularly good lecturer and I feel his opinions on what is important to know in a course are fairly antithetical to Eggert's. But that is possibly the result of teaching a databases course. Anyways, the course itself is not hard if you put in effort and engage with the material (which, to be fair, I did not), and I thought the exams were reasonable for the most part. His final grades were also very generous (I scored median on both the midterm and the final).

Rosario is a great lecturer, with incredibly detailed slides that he posts on Bruinlearn. He works at Google, and has a lot of good anecdotes from his professional career.

Some of the homeworks were easy, and some are more difficult, but they are all very straightforward.

There is an insane amount of content in this class. From the first to the last lecture Rosario will be lecturing for the entire class period, and he talks fast. Exams are completely open book, but extremely difficult. The curve is less generous than Eggert, but it's still there. I scored in the lower quartile on both the midterm and the final but still managed to scrape by with a B.

This course was pretty intense but overall I enjoyed it. Don't listen to the old reviews, they're not true anymore. Rosario is an amazing professor! He's the best CS professor I've had so far at UCLA. You can tell that he's truly passionate about his work and loves teaching students and helping them succeed. He's very helpful during office hours and works hard answering all our questions on Piazza. I've never had a professor respond so quickly to my Piazza posts.

Rosario is an amazing lecturer. Although there is a TON of content in this class and it can sometimes be dense, Rosario makes sure it's never boring. He cracks a lot of jokes and teaches in a very engaging way. I liked how lecture recordings were posted on YouTube after each lecture. Since there was so much content and Rosario goes through it at a rather quick pace (definitely doesn't speak sleep-inducingly slowly like Smallberg lol), I preferred to use the recordings rather than attend in-person so that I could take notes at my own pace. The slides were also pretty good. This class also has a textbook, but if you understand the lecture well, you don't have to read it since Rosario doesn't put things on his exams that were covered solely in the textbook and not in lecture.

There were 8 homeworks and four of them were graded on completion. The other ones were graded pretty leniently. Out of all the CS classes I've taken so far, this one definitely had the lightest assignment load. Even the most difficult and stressful one, homework/project 5, wasn't as bad as an average CS 32 assignment, and although it was challenging, it was still doable and it made me a better programmer. I also liked how we had 6 late days to use throughout the quarter.

Besides going through the lectures, the biggest time suck for this course for me was by far preparing for the exams. The other reviews are right in that the exams are insanely difficult, particularly the final. If you decide to take this class, you should definitely be prepared to set aside a lot of time to study for the exams; you will definitely not be able to get by with cramming. I did pretty bad on the midterm and the class average was 67, but fortunately Rosario values improvement, so you can improve your grade significantly by doing well on the final. I knew I'd have to do really well on the final to save my grade so I created an in-depth two-week study guide involving reviewing my notes, making flashcards, redoing hw, and doing practice problems from discussion section for each week of content. However, despite following my study plan to the T, I was still feeling terrified to take the final due to the many past reviews with horror stories about how hard it was. My fears certainly weren't unfounded, as the final exam was super difficult. No amount of studying could have prepared me for it. Despite being the final I had studied the most for at UCLA, I only got a C. The class average was 62.

However, here's the catch about the exams: they are curved very generously. Rosario curved my C on the final to an A, which let me end with an A in the class! I was so afraid my hard work would go to waste but thanks to the curve it did not. Many of my friends also said that the curve helped them a lot. Rosario even stated during the last lecture that he knows that we put a lot of effort into this class and that he tries to acknowledge that through his grading scheme.

So seriously, don't let the difficult exams or past reviews deter you from taking this class! You'll learn so much important info that will help you greatly in your CS career taught by a quadruple-Bruin seasoned industry professional who is clearly very passionate about student success. Although you may go through difficulties, they will make you a better student and programmer. This is not a class you want to miss out on and you should take it even if it's not required for your major. I promise, give it a try if you get the chance, you won't regret it ❤️

Edit: In case that wasn't enough convincing for you, I just received an internship offer all thanks to this class!!! After getting my grade back, I sent a follow-up email for a data science position saying I had just finished the course and explaining what I'd learned. That caught the company's interest, as despite ghosting me earlier and ignoring my previous follow-ups, they finally agreed to do a follow-up interview and gave me the offer! Seriously, you need to take this class, it will open doors for you!

Rosario is one of the most entertaining and laidback professors I’ve had in the CS department. Lectures will never bore you, as he cracks jokes or tells stories to break up heavy topics. Assignments were fun to do, and were somewhat comparable to the difficulty of the midterm. The final was tough; we were given new languages and some new scenarios and were meant to use intuition to solve those problems. However, the final was graded pretty generously.

Grading is extremely generous. This quarter, it was 40% HW, 25% MT, and 35% Final. HW was graded on a straight scale, while exams were curved. Rosario was very clear with what he considered to be an A-, B-, C on the midterm.

Overall, the practical content of the course and the perspective of learning from a hip, industry veteran made this class a fun time. Don’t miss out on this hidden gem of a class.

The reviews from 2019 and later quarters all ring true to some extent. Professor Rosario is a good lecturer who tries his best to help students, but his exams are hard as balls: the types of questions he asks are similar to Eggert's, but graded with little to no partial credit given. Had Cho not been on sabbatical, I don't think I would have taken his class, his exams are just too much...

There are some harsh reviews for Professor Rosario here on Bruinwalk. This is more than a little bit surprising to me, as I had an excellent experience taking 143 with him over the summer. Professor Rosario was an engaging lecturer, answered questions well, and was very helpful during office hours. There are several mentions of bullying/micro-aggressions among the other reviews, and given that they are from the same quarter during which I took the class, I must have missed them. All I can testify is that he was friendly and helpful during lectures and office hours and never gave any indications of being rude or dismissive with me that I could pick up on. I felt that the workload was on the easier end for the computer science department, although Eggert has skewed my perspective on normality, and the final was based off of the class (not an accomplishment, but then again we deal with some silly stuff here) and didn't jump out as being particularly unreasonable. It wasn't necessarily the best class I've ever taken but it didn't stand out as a negative experience. I'm only adding my review so that people know that the narrative that Rosario is an asshole is not a universal experience and perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt.

The professor was really nice and helpful. He answered Piazza posts extremely quickly and thoughtfully.

We had a mini-project for extra credit. This probably bumped my grade up from B+ territory up to an A.

I'm not sure how good his lectures are, since I just looked over the slides, but from the brief snippets of the recording I saw, they seemed okay. His slides, however, are very good, IMO.

There were only 5 homework assignments, and the workload for each of these was not too bad. I think each of these assignments could be done in an afternoon.

The midterm was okay, but the final was a bit harder. I just reviewed the lecture slides, homework assignments, and discussion slides. I received a 88% for the midterm and 80% for the final.