Difficult but necessary, Ethan Blanton does a great job at teaching it

Blanton is a great professor delivering a cleverly designed course. If you put the effort and hours in and find the projects/subject matter engaging it'll definitely advance your skills in the craft of computer programming at the lower-level, at least as far as I can tell.

The key here is EFFORT - making to carefully read the project-instruction handouts, digest the lecture material, and most importantly put in early and frequent time into the projects.

Blanton is great. He's all-around enthusiastic and is happy to answer any question he's proffered. I've read reports of people finding him to be excessively terse or otherwise intimidating, but in my experience upon approaching him that obviously isn't the case.

In my opinion the textbook readings are overly-emphasized - this isn't to say they're useless, but that the degree of emphasis might impede naive students. It seems to me that the most immediate imperative for excelling in this class is to start on projects early and attend as many Office Hours as possible - if you're still stuck then the textbooks might help.