Amit Sengupta

A lot of people had problems with this class this semester. It was not planned out at all. The first two projects were extremely easy, and the last two, extremely difficult. What made it even more frustrating, is that the actual project requirements were not given to us untill like a week before it was due. Sure, we had a while to work on it, but we didn't cover any material related to the project. I found myself using the books and Internet a lot to find information needed to complete the projects. This is the first class to use Java, but it seemed that it was a pre-requisite to take this class. There were a lot of experts in this class who already had experience in Java, and I felt like they took over, towards the end, and twisted the way the class proceeded. I mean if you want to learn more, do it on your own! Don't just speed up a class where people are still struggling with concepts. As far as the profesor is concerned, he tried. You gotta give him that. He's obviously inexperienced and not familiar with Java that much, and I think our grader would have been a better teacher. Hopefully the prof. will make some adjustments in the following semesters.

Prof Levine was tough because he challenged his students. Prof Sengupta was tough because we weren't able to understand the information he was conveying. Sengupta would give us projects and provide us with no clear explaination about how to implement the project. All he did was rewrite examples from books without explaining how the example works.

If you do take the course, then need to know XML, XHTML, SAX, DOM, JAVA, and GUI. Sengupta doesn't go into detail about these subjects. I have a feeling he doesn't fully understands these concepts himself. Every time we would ask him a question, he would just answer "right.. right.." without explaining. He doesn't make up his own projects, he just copies someone elses projects and puts it off as his own. Anyways, don't take his class unless you are willing to learn the material on your own or if you are already a JAVA guru.