PHYS 2660

Professor Neu, as has been stated several times, is a charming guy. When he does show up, he makes the lectures very entertaining with a great sense of humor. However, in all of the lectures, aside from maybe the first two about hardware on a computer, I did not learn a single thing about coding in C. The first few homework assignments are easy, which make you feel as though you'll be fine. And, even if you don't understand, he claims he will post the solutions. Now, as the year goes on, you still are learning nothing in lecture, and the homework gets extremely time-consuming and nearly impossible for someone without a coding background. You notice that the grades for the homework do not come back, so you have no clue how you are doing, and receive no feedback. At the time, I was in several 4000 level courses, and this 2000 level course was by far my most difficult. Luckily, I had Gage Dezoort as a TA, who was absolutely amazing. If you take this course, you better hope you enjoy your TA, because they are going to be the only possibility of you surviving the class. I would not recommend this course, unfortunately, physics majors have to take it. Good luck.

While Neu is an interesting lecturer, he covers material either too quickly or too slowly. The pace picks up rapidly after spring break, and the lectures get harder to follow as a result. This is exacerbated by the fact that Neu is disorganized and frequently cancels. This seems nice until the end of the semester rolls around and a good portion of the material still hasn't been covered.

The homeworks start out easy and get increasingly difficult, but ultimately, they're still manageable. Exams aren't too hard, although it's easy to screw either or both of them up. The grades get curved at the end of the year (which saved me).

This class started out great. As someone with little programming experience I found it fun and challenging. But then, it became evident how little effort Professor Neu was putting into the class. Out of the 14 lectures, he cancelled or was absent from 6 of them. Deadlines for homework assignments seemed non-negotiable, but the professor didn't grade the first 6 weeks of homework until a week after spring break. The next 7 homework assignments weren't graded until AFTER the final exam. Solutions to the homework, were not posted until the first week of May. The last few weeks of the class, the homework assignments became increasingly difficult with a big emphasis on statistics (which is not a prerequisite for the course), with poor explanations in the lecture slides. Professor Neu seems like a good person, and when he showed up to lectures, was pretty entertaining. But, he is a horrible teacher and so poorly organized. Chances are that if you need to take this class, that you can take CS 1110 instead. CS 1110 is offered through the Engineering School and focuses on teaching Python instead of C. However, if you want to learn C as well, you can always take PHYS 1660 in the fall, taught by Professor Wright. PHYS 1660 covers the same stuff as in PHYS 2660 and is better taught and does not include the ridiculous statistics assignments (plus its only 1 credit, so a fairly light workload and an easy extra A if you put the work in).

If you are good at CS already, this may be a very manageable course for you, but not having a strong CS background hurt me. The Physics parts of the class are essentially given to you or are basic enough to figure out with little difficulty but it is a very fast-paced "intro" to C programming. If you are not willing to put a huge time chunk of your semester into this class, do not take it. I wish I would have gone to office/lab hours every week (very helpful). Professor Neu and the TAs are incredible with helping and answering any questions you have at any time of day, but there's only so much they can do to help. The textbook is valuable until about halfway through the semester when it becomes a "figure it out" kind of class (some homework assignments were created without solutions, which is cool but hard to get help on). This part was my fault, but since the homeworks were often (thankfully) pushed back to midnight Saturday due dates because of their difficulty, I spent a majority of my Friday and Saturday nights towards the end of the semester in the library :(. It's tough to get started early on homework assignments when the last week's assignment took 20+ hours (a few weeks may be like this for some) so I recommend starting on assignments asap, but you will spend a lot of time on this class regardless. If you're willing to put in the hours to intensely improve your scientific programming skills: go for it, the class will teach you a ton, but it's not for everyone. The class is interesting and helpful but also significantly more time consuming than any 3 credit class I've taken.

Awesome professor, engaging lectures. Tough to get into homeworks, can be challenging if waiting until last minute. However, if you use office hours and pay attention in class it is manageable. Not much physics at all, mostly a coding class so it can difficult to people who haven't taken a computer class before

I found this class to be very challenging, but enjoyable. Professor Neu is a great guy and a funny, engaging lecturer. Often times however the lectures fall behind in the material, and Prof. Neu frequently pushed material back a week, which led to some material not being covered by the end of the semester.

This class covers the C programming language and uses it for statistical analysis and scientific applications. In my opinion, I don't think the course acts as an adequate introduction to C or programming, which is covered in the first few lectures. The class is taught off of lecture slides, which isn't as helpful as just having every student follow along and write code while the teacher demonstrates the subject, á la CS 1110. But anyway by the middle of the semester everyone seemed to have a grasp on what was happening.

The homeworks were never too difficult, but some of them really challenged me, and took up a fair portion of my time. The TAs and Professor Neu are great resources, and office hours are easily accessible and a great help in completing the homework. The final this year took an incredible amount of time to complete and was very challenging, so beware.

I found this class to be very fun and rewarding and I would recommend it to others; however I already knew how to program because I took CS 1110, so I was able to pass a significant hurdle in this class that many other students might struggle with. In conclusion, this class is good, but challenging, and to not struggle, use your resources - the TAs, the professor, and the textbooks.

Professor Neu is an awesome and charming guy. He is a very good teacher in explaining the material. However, this class is relatively difficult, and this is coming from a computer science major.

This class basically is composed of programming and statistics - the physics portion of this class is rather trivial. The labs are whatever, just show up and do the activities - doesn't really matter if you finish them or not, as long as you understand the concepts (concepts don't really matter in the later labs).

The homeworks on the other hand are very very challenging, but doable. They are only hard because of some concept that wasn't covered in depth during the lectures, and Professor Neu just wants you to figure it out, which isn't very fair sometimes.

And so I would say this class moves very very fast, covering everything in CS 1110 and a bit more within the first 4-5 weeks, in a language much more difficult than Java. If you're a physics major who has no experience in computer science, you may be in a bit of trouble. But the professor and TA (mine was Rob) are really valuable resources that are there for you to succeed.

Note: I didn't buy/use either one of the required texts, which may have made things more difficult than it should have been, but then again, I don't know.

Edit: I had an A in the class but he curved down, so watch out.