Mutz is probably among the best lecturers I've ever had. Very clean, professional slides and the guy knows what he's talking about, since he also works at a pretty high up position for a tech company.

The class covers very relevant and interesting technology (Ruby on Rails, TravisCI, Git, Amazon Web Services), and not your standard Lisp / C stuff that you need to run in a command line on the Linux servers. He assigns reading and practice from the textbook, and those are not enforced but highly recommended. 100% of your grade comes from a group project / report due at the end of the class.

The project involves building a web app and using a variety of techniques to scale it to handle thousands of users. The textbook and a little bit of the class cover web development and how to incorporate features into your app but the main focus is on scaling, so mostly concerning the database / backend. You can go tryhard mode and make a killer web app or you can just build a simple app; either way you'll get the same grade if you do all the methods he mentions for scaling.