CS 4640

As other reviews have mentioned, this class is a lot of work. But one side effect of that is you get a lot of stuff for your portfolio, which is really nice. The project is a lot of work and so is the homework. In my opinion, he should cut out 2-3 of the HWs to make the class more manageable. I also found the exams really tough, asking extremely niche questions like "How do you split a page to make a certain layout in Bootstrap?" (I don't understand the purpose of having an exam on questions like this). The average for the midterm was around 65% so it seems like an oversight on the professor's part. Despite this, you learn a lot and if you aren't self-motivated to make stuff for your portfolio this class definitely pushes you in the right direction. I'd still recommend taking it since it's the only way to get web experience in a class at UVA. #tCFS24

I thought the reviews were exaggerating :( I've taken multiple classes w/Hott before and loved him so I think it's just a matter of the class workload being excruciating. SO much work every week, many of these weekly assignments involve creating an entire website, a lot of the concepts requiring you to learn on your own rather than through the lectures. Would 100% recommend Hott for any course and I think if you truly love web development and can learn new languages easily, you'll enjoy this class. But this class has been really stressful for me and there are barely enough hours in the day to finish the work. Hott is super friendly though and is willing to work with you to make sure you understand the knowledge. Difficult course but great professor

This class is very, very difficult. You have weekly quizzes, which correspond with the lectures of that week, that I found to be pretty difficult at times (but doable). You also have almost weekly homework assignments, which take hours to complete, because you are also working on a semester-long project that you have. Being able to balance the homework assignments and the project is extremely difficult because they are both labor intensive. Also, the project is setup in a frustrating way given that they teach you HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and Angular (in that order), and they have you make the application in one language, then for the next project you do it in the next language, and so forth. This causes your project to change so much from what you already had intended, and sometimes the additions are simply just to check off boxes and get points. This class caused me so much stress this past semester, and I know that I am not the only student who feels this way. Don't get me wrong, Professor Hott is very nice, and he knows what he's talking about, but this class was barely manageable, even as somebody who had slight experience in Web Development. #tCFFall2021

I'm going to be real, this course is honestly a lot of work. There are weekly quizzes, and almost weekly homeworks /project sprints which are pretty time consuming, and overall this class ended up taking a lot of my time. For some reason I thought this would be a sort of chill class, but it really isn't. I had some experience working in Web Dev previously, but to my knowledge some of the things you learn in this class(mainly PHP) are outdated now, so that kind of killed motivation. The homeworks/sprints as well increased in difficulty dramatically after the first 2 weeks, and started to take me an average of 5-7 hours. Sometimes a Homework would feel extremely difficult given what had been gone over in lecture, and at one point a good amount people started asking for less on Piazza lol. I'd really only rec this if you are very interested in the subject.