So far, he's been pretty good. He's not the most interesting teacher, but he's also the only teacher I've noticed at UCLA that uses the correct notation (ie, Wikipedia's notation) for matrix operations, etc. Will add more later if he turns out to be terrible or something, but I like him so far.

Stay away from this guy. He is very smart and assumes that you have ridiculously extensive linear algebra backgrounds. We all have taken linear algebra, I received an A in linear algebra, but what he expects you to know is unreasonable. He is a TERRIBLE lecturer, if you don't understand something and ask a question he will literally laugh at you in front of the class. Do yourself a favor, take it with Faloustous.

Soatto is indeed very smart and knows his subject (specializing in computer vision) well. The trouble is that he can't teach well, though he tries. I took 174A with him after auditing that class with a different professor a quarter earlier. This was a big mistake on my end. Soatto's lectures are highly theoretical and he omits a lot of details (probably because they seem to be obvious to him). I was lost (and so was 90% of the class) for the entire quarter; the average on midterm was 40% and even lower on the final. So, unless computer graphics and vision theory is your passion, or you've done plenty of graphics work on your own, I suggest you stay away from Soatto, or you'll have to suffer and end up with a poor grade.