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.