Biochemistry I is a very interesting and challenging course. If you put the time in it can be a lot of fun and very rewarding when you do well.

It's a lot of memorizing structures and their features. It will prepare you well for other classes such as molecular genetics or, of course, biochem II

Pellois is a very funny and engaging professor. He can sometimes get off track which takes away from content time. He posts his slides which is helpful. The only thing I hated was the length of his Exams. No one every felt like they had enough time to truly elaborate on his free response questions whether it was essay based or drawing the entirety of watson & crick base pairing in DNA. Some of his questions are worth 25 points on their own so if you get it wrong you're basically screwed. I'd say he grades fairly, maybe a bit tough but you really should know the structures so i think its fair. He also will give class lectures about how we're not trying hard enough and we need to stop slacking off which kind of sucks when you spend a lot of time on the class lol

Draw the structures over and over and over again. Never procrastinate, it will hurt you.