Reviews for William Pugh
Average Rating:| ashivkum Course: CMSC132H Grade Expected: A- October 13, 2011, 12:13 pm | Best professor in the department, in terms of balancing knowledgability, skill of teaching, and inspiration he provides to students to go out and learn things for themselves. I had a slightly rough semester (in terms of workload), but managed to learn a lot from him. Skips around a lot, beginning of class is devoted to announcements and sidenotes (he shows a lot of XKCDs, HacDC, and other topics related to the subject, but outside the scope of class, which sometimes takes up most of the class), we were one of the few classes who actually explored threading a bit more in-depth than others. 3 projects every semester are devoted to going out on your own, picking a project you want to do, and doing it. It should be "something cool", "something cooler", and "something coolest" respectively. Go to his office hours not just for questions on projects, but just for general interest in the subject. Get to know the guy. He may be helpful in the future, in terms of internships and jobs (had many stints with Google and other major companies) |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC132H Grade Expected: A August 25, 2011, 6:16 pm | Overall the honors version of this class is good to take because of the small class size and the opportunity to get help on projects from the professor. Pugh was a pretty good teacher, and was very knowledgeable of all the material. Sometimes I felt like he skipped around to different topics not in the curriculum, or he would expect us to know certain things without having spent time on them in class. I also got frustrated on some of the projects because it seemed like we hadn't learned enough to do them, but in the end this helped me learn better. He would provide more information about the projects as they got closer to the deadlines and would provide ample time in class to work on them/ask questions. Id say take this class over the regular version. |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC132H Grade Expected: B May 20, 2011, 12:51 pm | Pros: The curriculum is fair, he provides some really great tools for motivation with stuff you can do outside of class, and he's got great experience. Also, he really takes the time to know and help his students. If you approach him with a question, be it class-oriented or about computer science in general, he'll go into great detail and make sure he answers your question despite how long it might take. Cons: This is probably a personal thing, but he he didn't teach with slides which might work for a lot of people, but I feel like after glazing over the information in lecture, I learned more from slides from different sections. Overall, this class is still worth taking. |
| bigbabby Course: CMSC132H Grade Expected: May 13, 2011, 8:56 pm | He's an interesting guy, and a pretty good professor. He allows laptops in class and mainly teaches by example and not powerpoint, which prevents class from becoming a slog. Only potential downside is that he assigns more projects and at a faster interval. If you are truly interested in programming and becoming better at it, Pugh is a good cs132 professor, but if you didn't do so great in 131 and are just scraping by, look for someone else. |
| random Course: CMSC433 Grade Expected: A June 7, 2010, 10:09 pm | Bill Pugh is one of the most famous (professionally) professors in CS dept. And he clearly knows his stuff very well. Unfortunately, you are not going to get much of it unless you make special efforts. He designed 433 in a slightly different way than described in the catalog; it was heavy on concurrent programming and we did very little on design patterns. I learned a lot in this course, but it was mostly by reading his slides and doing projects (one every week, and great fun). He isn't a very good grader; partial credit is hard to come by. Despite the fact that he is so knowledgeable, he won't make efforts to ensure students understand what he is talking about. He just reads through his slides and considers his job done. I would take this class with someone else if I can. But Pugh ain't that bad either. |
| ajlohr Course: CMSC132H Grade Expected: A+ May 16, 2010, 4:04 pm | though he did stray in content a fair bit from what the course description was, it ended up making the class more interesting. The semester that I had him (Fall 09), he had three times throughout the semester in which you had the freedom to pick your own project topic and learn a lot outside of class on something that interested you. That being said, don't take him if you aren't motivated enough to work on and learn rigorous individualized material on your own.Also, he put up several of his personal books as prizes for the writers of the best projects. Also, he had an interesting policy that apart from regular lecture time, there were optional subgroups that students could choose to join. His choice not to focus on the somewhat dull material covered by the 132 course ended up making the course a lot more interesting and provided honors students with an opportunity for quasi-independent work at times. In general, he was incredibly flexible to class desires in how he would run his class. |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC132H Grade Expected: A+ May 20, 2008, 11:37 am | Pugh is a really interesting professor, and really knows his stuff when it comes to Java (he wrote part of the language spec). He is a pretty good teacher, though in the honors section we would often times digress from curriculum to talk about other things - which meant learning some things on your own. |