CS 4720

I really enjoyed this course with Sherriff. It was my first time taking a class of his and his enthusiasm for the material he teaches makes the class more interesting and engaging, and he's also funny and a nice person. Towards the beginning of the semester there were 2 or 3 classes dedicated just to Kotlin coding, and at this point I thought I wouldn't like the class because it was confusing and hard to follow (to me, anyways.) But the class quickly expanded past that to topics like the history of mobile dev & languages, architecture, databases, and what makes good design. The content is pretty interesting, and Sherriff is good at explaining those concepts.

Your grade consists of 3 projects (2 mini-apps, and 1 final project app), and 3 quizzes. We only had 2 quizzes due to the events of the semester, and in my opinion they were fair because the material comes directly from the class/ slides. Make sure you study though, because you do actually have to know the material. The final exam gives you an opportunity to make up any points you missed from the quizzes. The projects consisted of two mini bucketlist apps made in two different languages, and one final app of your choice in any language. The two mini apps you worked on alone, and for the final project you could work alone or with a partner. I personally struggled with the projects, especially the one in Kotlin, but the projects were the most valuable part of this course to me because I learned a lot while making them. I recommend starting each project early unless you are experienced with mobile dev/ react already.

Overall, this has been my favorite course I've taken at UVA. I got into CS because I wanted to make games, apps, and websites, and I feel that this course put me on the right track to be able to achieve that. Thank you Sherriff!

There are 4 projects throughout the course, and they are really helpful for learning how to develop apps. Sherriff had "mandatory days" where he took attendance and the class did an activity like making a mock app and sharing their findings. This class is fine, my only drawback is Sherriff's directions aren't always clear and he gets kinda weird if people are in class and they aren't paying attention. If you like Sherriff, I bet you will like this class.

The class is pretty straightforward. Sherriff takes attendance sometimes at the beginning of class. The class is pretty much teach yourself. Online tutorials are pretty helpful for the 3 projects (2 ppl per group). You had an android miniapp (quiz taking app, learned about fragments), an ios miniapp (bucketlist app) and a final project with a couple of requirements such as using gps, phone's native hardware an either connecting to a third-part api or creating your own. If you don't have a mac you have to go to the lab to code.

Like someone else said, the midterm is in class essay format about broad topics. For the final, he gives you a list of 20 questions he could possibly ask beforehand so you can prepare. You can take the final verbally or written. He even lets you work with as many people as you want to prepare for the questions although you can't just copy and paste if you do the written final. If you take it verbally, you go to his office, roll a die to randomly select 2 questions and then you answer them. It's a conversation so he may ask you follow up questions if you need to expand on a point more. If you take the written final, I think you have 3 hours or something to answer 3 (as opposed to 2) of the prepared questions.

This course made me think more sincerely about web development. I thought that the professor could have done a better job structuring lectures so that they were more relevant to our coursework. The beginning of the semester was focused on android and iOS development but the latter half of the semester was really unrelated to the subject matter generally.

This course isn't really all it's hyped up to be. For whatever reason, Sherriff was quite often under-prepared for lectures. Most disappointingly, a lot of lecture time is spent on just him showing you his IDE, pointing out chunks of code that do things without mentioning why or how. That being said, the class was easy to get an A in, but I didn't find it that worthwhile. There's a midterm and final that are just short answer questions. The projects take some time but really don't teach you much that a quick youtube tutorial couldn't.
Overall, easy class with projects take some time; but lectures never felt that useful and gave the impression they were put together 30 minutes before class. If you really need a boost to get into mobile development go for it, but I don't think it will yield much more of a benefit than just studying it on your own.

This class was pretty fun for me, as I am very interested in mobile development.

Mark Sherriff is an entertaining person, and probably a good professor, but his talents weren't really put to good use in this class. The lectures were not highly-attended and honestly not very engaging either. In his defense, it's kind of a difficult topic to teach, or at least it seems that way. Regardless, I feel like I learned a lot, but mostly on my own time.

The group projects are the backbone of the class. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot while doing them. There is an Android and an iOS project. You can choose to create any kind of app you want, but you are given requirements for each milestone that your app must incorporate.

There is a midterm and a final in this class. Both were in essay format. The midterm was in class, and either graded much more harshly, or I didn't fully understand what they were looking for. The final could be completed at home over a period of time, and it was open book and open notes. I did much better on this one.

Overall, it's a great class if you're interested in mobile development. It's also not very hard to get an A.

This was a good course, covering many topics that are relevant for modern software development.

However, I'm not sure why Professor Sherriff focuses so much on enterprise programming and things like SOAP; for the vast majority of us, these things aren't very important and if we needed them in a job we could pick them up quickly.

Likewise the course seemed a bit dated. Assignments required PHP as the back end language, whereas we only touched on Node.js briefly. Given that development today is usually done with back end languages such as Ruby, Python, or Node, I'm not sure why we didn't go into further detail on those subjects. I also would have liked to see more mobile development, though I think this is coming in future iterations of the course.

Overall it was a worthwhile course, especially if you come into it not knowing much about web or mobile development already.

This class doesn't comprise of too many things grade-wise. Two midterms, two giant projects (split into smaller assignments/milestones), and a final. There were some quizzes, but due to the large size of the class and limited TA staff, those never got graded. The midterms are easy IF you study A LOT for them and take notes in class. Don't just scan through the lectures- make a study guide, review the slides and re-listen to his recordings. His lectures were great in my opinion. I usually sat in the back and I could see half the class not paying attention, but he's actually a really engaging lecturer and makes a lot of jokes.

You have to self-teach most of the way for both the web and mobile projects. He'll give you basic examples in class and if he thinks a part of it requires a lot of steps or something that can't be googled easily, he'll walk you through. The Web project wasn't bad (PHP, CSS, and HTML are super easy to learn), just follow directions and put some effort in to make your website look nice.

For the mobile project, we had to set up a raspberry pi and ran into soooo many issues with it. But going to Sherriff's office hours helped a ton. Some people thought it was unfair he made us learn Android so quickly, but he honestly gave us a fair amount of time for us to learn it. All those milestones are there for a reason, implement each part of the app when they're due. Most of the stuff (asynchronous threading, connecting the app to a third-party app like facebook or twitter) took a LOT of googling and experimenting and frustration (3-4 hours max) but less than 10 minutes to implement once we figured out what to do. The only hard part was creating a nice GUI - Android Studio's design software was not very user-friendly, but he counted functionality way more than design in the end since there are just too many other things we had to have working. Overall, one of the most useful classes I've taken in college.

This could be an incredibly cool class, but Sherriff feels the need to cover so much more than is necessary. He's a great lecturer and is clearly enthusiastic about the subject matter, however he's merciless when it comes to grading.

Beyond that, he grossly underestimated the time commitment on the group project, assuming that everyone would just pick up Android programming and run with it. Like multi-threading, action-oriented programming, and GUI design are just easy as pie.

While I think the subject matter of this class is worth it, I will say that you should not take this too seriously grade-wise. It's not an easy A like everyone is saying, it takes time commitment and you can get really boned on the quizzes.

Sherriff does a great job teaching this class, overall a pretty easy A if you go to class, have done something with PHP/HTML before and are willing to learn android. Be wary of you group for the project, some are disasters while others are awesome so try and work with people you trust.