Course was well setup to get a good understanding of the material.

Gets you a foundation in Python, very useful.

Prof. Aggarwal is very caring and a decent lecturer.

Make sure you know all of the content as you are learning it, don't save all of your studying for right before the exams.

A few people struggled with it, but a lot found it pretty easy. You don’t need any programming experience to do well and the course load can take 2-10 hours per week, depending on how quickly you pick up on the material.

Videos before class with weekly quizzes. You get 2 attempts on the quizzes so its not that hard to do well and the videos are useful. In class he explained the content a bit then did example problems.

Overall the professor was good but could get frustrated if you didn’t get a concept after he explained it a few times.

Good introduction to programming concepts. If you know any semblence of coding beforehand (or you took APCSA/CSP), you'll easily be equipped to learn more of the more "difficult" concepts of the course. For context, I was able to get an A in this course while taking two other college classes and a full AP/AICE high school courseload. You'll do great! Grading is pretty lax, there's quite a few lab and quiz drops and you'll have two attempts for the quizzes. There are plenty of resources that the TAs give to help you prepare for exams (which are split into MCQs (including regular MCQ and debugging questions) and FRQs (if you've taken APCSA, they're nearly identical, you just get to do them on the computer)). There's a final exam as well as a final group project. The final project was just a ...read more

You'll learn all the basic (and some more complex) concepts of programming, applied through Python. You'll learn about variables, if-statements, basic data structures (i.e. lists, tuples, dictionaries), pointers, functions, classes, test cases, etc. You also get a glimpse into everyday software engineering using git and Github for one lab and the final project.

Prof. Aggarwal really knows how to explain the course content well to beginners! He does lots of step-by-step examples, so you're sure to get a good grasp.

Get started on projects and labs early! Debugging can be annoying.