Super important course with super important material. I've got some unpopular opinions here, both taking the course and TAing it, but hear me out.

Put in the work. Listen to lecture. Take notes. Go to office hours. Ask questions. Kurt knows what he's talking about, but he doesn't care if you don't care. If you go into this class thinking "oh i have Kurt, he's the mean professor I don't want to be here i want someone easy like Boady >:(" you've already set yourself up for failure. You'll spend the entire class grumpy and looking for reasons why Kurt is bad so you can tell all your friends to avoid him. I got an A in this course with Kurt. I wrote down everything he wrote on the board. Every algorithm he wrote down worked almost perfectly when I stuck it into Python. Sometimes minor tweaks had to be made, but consistently I was able to plug in what he wrote on the board. This made the homework SUPER easy because I already had the bul...read more

My opinion is Kurt and Long > Nowak > Boady. Boadys an easy A. But just like his 171, you won't learn ****. If you wanna take Vasilis's 500 level DSA, you cannot take Boady because you will be horribly unprepared. If you want an easy A, take Boady. If you want to learn material, do well in coding interviews and future classes, take Kurt or Long. Long is a great professor in every way. They've got Kurt's values of prioritizing effort but they're a much better online professor. In person, I'd say they're both very good at explaining the material. Long is more approachable though. The only downside about Long is they use ZyBooks.

This is probably the most important course you'll take

tl;dr: Dr. Boady all the way if at all possible. I've TA'd this course numerous times with numerous different instructors, including one term where I was assigned to both Dr. Nowak and Dr. Boady's sections of the course at the same time. It was kind of rough because whenever someone approached me to ask for help with the homework or go over a quiz or project, I'd have to remember to ask whether they had Boady or Nowak as the two versions of the course are very different while still ultimately covering the same material. I've also helped CS260 students in both Nowak's version and everyone else's version of the course in terms in which I was assigned to other courses, so I'm familiar with the course as taught by various instructors and the differences among them. I sort of mentioned this l...read more

I took this class in person last year. I ended with an A but unfortunately didn’t learn much. When I took it he would do a lot of math on the whiteboard and talk, but I would just keep getting lost. This was because I did not put in enough effort to do the readings beforehand and so there was no background for what he was talking about. There were weekly group quizzes which were open book. Exams were also open book, but taken by yourself. Assignments every once in a while, and there was a group project where a certain number of coding problems must be done, so you just divide them amongst your group.

Read the book! or at least research the topics that will be discussed so you can actually appreciate what he is saying. For every problem, WRITE SOMETHING DOWN. He is a super easy grader and is very kind. (For classes in general) Asks questions when you are confused. It can be hard to put yourself out there, but you are usually helping a lot of people by doing so

Nowak is really cool, take the class with him if you can