CS 2110

This course was challenging to complete in the summer because of the timeframe, but it was very worthwhile and rewarding to do. I learned it with Professor McBurney and he showed up everyday ready to teach with great energy and awesome examples and comparisons of CS concepts to real world things. It is very structured and organized. Now in CS 2150, I have consistently felt ready to learn new topics because of the conceptual understanding I got from this course and I really appreciate Professor McBurney's class.
The reading for this course shouldn't be bad if you have the entire semester to do it too.

2110 as a whole is an awful and really poorly designed class (you'll understand why when you get to 2150). This has less to do with the professor, and more to do with the structure/content of the course. McBurney is not a good professor though. His lectures are hard to follow, and he goes off the slides very often. Luckily, you can just attend Basit's lectures unofficially and you'll be fine. Really not an enjoyable class though.

Professor McBurney was amazing!! He was such a fun professor to have but yet was did a good job of teaching. He explained abstract topics in a way that was easy to understand and spent much of class doing coding examples as opposed to going over a powerpoint. You can really see how much he enjoys teaching as a job if you take one of his classes. I remember one class that I remember have fun in was when he had driven to buy A LOT of Pez Dispensers to give out to students during class because one of the coding examples included Pez Dispensers. Additionally with the switch to online learning, he started streaming on Twitch for classes and would often include his cute cats in his streams while also including random asides about games that his students asked about in the chat. I would say that this class is definitely manageable as there are a lot of different assignments that buffer your grade in the class such as lab attendance, online quizzes, in-class assignments, homework etc. The exams I also felt were a good indicator of how well a student understood the material. I would say that as long as you put in work for the class, you will be able to do well!

I originally was enrolled in Prof Stone’s lecture before I was finally able to switch out after two weeks. McBurney is so much better. He is very friendly and clearly knows what he is talking about. His teaching style depends heavily on doing coding examples in class rather than PowerPoints which can be a bit difficult to keep up with but overall very helpful for learning. 2110 in general is not a super easy class especially if you didn’t take AP CS but if you have McBurney or Basit you’ll be fine.

Professor McBurney is relatively funny guy who tries to make the course interesting by making jokes at himself. I mean it works. He is actually a great professor who is very good at explaining abstract concepts with real world examples. Definitely recommend taking this class with him. You will learn a lot.

Having AP computer science background for this class is a big help as the material between the two is fairly similar. You cover some of the fundamental data structures and algorithms like arrays, maps, heaps, different sorts, etc. In terms of actual software development, however, the class is somewhat lacking, but it does introduce some key concepts like the lifecycle of a project and development concepts like test-driven development as well as teaching how to write effective tests for code. The tests can be tricky and they definitely take some preparation, but if you stay on top of the material they are not too bad and there is a lot of TA and professor help.

Having taken AP CS in high school, this class was pretty easy. A pretty significant portion of the curriculum overlaps, so up until the first midterm the overwhelming majority of the classwork was just about general coding principles and OOP stuff with Java. After that there were various topics that were covered at a pretty simple level, including data structures (sets, trees, etc. — one of the labs was about implementing your own tree structure), algorithms (basic runtime complexity, stuff like big O), and multithreading (which sounds harder than it is). I can't comment too much on McBurney himself because I never attended lecture except to take exams (all slides are online and lectures are recorded), but he seemed pretty nice.
There are like 6 or 7 primary homework assignments, along with daily (per-lecture) activities and labs. The daily activities are due by the end of the day of lecture, and are pretty trivial. The TAs are also pretty lax with lab grading (basically you just show up and get 100), so that's not too hard either. Also you get notecards for the exams, which aren't very challenging on their own already.