I was apprehensive going in with no programming experience but they very explicitly teach you everything you need to know. The course was well structured with plenty of opportunity to interact with the material. If you do the pre-readings, worksheets, tutorials, and review materials an 80+ should be very achievable. I thought the final was very reasonable but others did not.

There is one lecture where participation is marked (2%) and a tutorial (no participation marks) each week this vaguely corresponds to a worksheet and tutorial consisting of coding that can be mostly completed in class time. These are very doable especially if you attend the tutorial where you can ask lots of questions. There is a group project which is a pain but its not worth very much.

Professor Tompkins made the course engaging. Utilize the Youtube videos, office hours, applets, and review sessions if required.

Read/study the textbook. About 50% of the exam is either in the textbook or mentioned like once in lecture. Do the practice exams as questions will often be similar. Take learning the code seriously as many of the answers to fill-in-blank code questions will not be on the reference sheet. Redoing the tutorials/worksheets before exams is helpful. Be careful with the tutorials as the auto grader with hidden tests can be strict.

Extremely useful course and nice professor.

Can be somewhat high courseload/learning curve if you have never touched code before. Very enjoyable after you get the ball rolling.

Extremely useful course and nice professor.

Stay on top of the work and don't fall behind. The concepts aren't hard if you ask questions the moment they come up and don't pile up the confusion until last minute.

a very useful course and not at all difficult if you pay attention and study weekly

he's so good at explaining all the concepts, just pay attention to what he says and you'll be golden.

just make sure you keep up with the weekly tutorials and assignments and you'll be prepared for the exams as well. do focus on understanding the code and the concepts behind it as well.

Very light class workload, you can finish almost everything in the class itself. But this can make you quite lazy and not commit things to memory before the final. I did not learn as much as I should, which is a shame since it is quite interesting and useful.

Read the textbook before class