It was a lot better than expected. Its definitely improved since the summers before. There were some course organizational things but the lecturer was very flexible and willing to change things for students. Our first exam was apparently a total failure (50 minutes to download, write a program from scratch + test cases, and submitting), but they adjusted and gave us a longer exam for 4 hours. Surprisingly, I learned a lot. Definitely a step up from CS 159. There was a programming assignment every 5-6 days and plenty of extra credit (4 assignments). Feedback on these assignments sometimes took a while, especially at the end (but honestly the feedback was just auto-grader so it wasn't that helpful).

He explains things pretty well, but some lectures weren't as organized (i.e. some lectures was spent just debugging code he wrote in class). He is also usually quick about email replies and regrade requests.

If you can't start a programming assignment early, at least read through it and think about it. Sometimes just more time thinking about a solution makes the whole process faster. I think most of the people that didn't do so well in the course had a lot of other commitments that made it hard to keep up. Do the practice exam question like you would do the exam (timed). It is good practice and it is possible you might be able to modify the test cases in the practice exam to fit the actual exam. Brush up on some vim and unix commands.