For the online version:
Lectures were pretty messy since he was constrained to an ipad, he would probably be better in a lecture hall with a lot of whiteboards. I ended up not going to lectures after week 5 because I couldn't follow. So a good part was he gave us 24 hours for the midterm and 72 for the final. The final was hard just because I think the concepts were a lot more difficult to grasp compared to what was on the midterm, but its not like the questions were unreasonably difficult, if that makes sense. I did end up using the entire time to figure out solutions for all the questions though, so that was really stressful three days.
The homework is not crazy hard and collaboration is fine.

Basically I would recommend this class if you are able to learn on your own, since he doesn't try to be unfair and trick you or anything. And if it goes back to in person his lectures would probably be much better than my experience.

Professor Hsieh was incoherent and a very poor lecturer. I eventually stopped showing up to class and only read the textbook since I never learned anything from him. He gave decently difficult homework but there weren't usually that many questions. The midterm was not too bad but his final was definitely very tough.

Professor is very clear and has this down to a science at this point. The textbook is INSANELY HELPFUL, even more so than lectures IMO.

This class involves some healthy mind-gymnastics to do well in. I ended up spending ~10h just solving each homework, plus an additional 5h writing up my solutions. Needless to say it was a little grindy at times, but this class was really good at getting me to understand the Algs. I wish we spent more time on Dynamic Programming, of which we basically only scratched the surface in this class.

He said we would have 500 homework points, worth 50% of our grade total, but we ended up having 350 points (4 assignments), so they ended up counting for a lot more of our grade. The midterm was fair, but took a looong time to writeup (24h window). The final had a 48h window, and even with all that time I still ended up not fully solving one problem. Pretty hard stuff for sure.