Preface: I'm not a CS or Engineering major or anything related to this course. I just took it to see if I would like it.

Stahl himself is a great guy - very quirky and occasionally makes good jokes. He is extremely patient (sometimes I don't understand how patient he is) and will go to great lengths to help students. But his lectures are so so boring and he talks so quietly that it's so easy to fall asleep in the large, dark, cold room that is Moore 100. His lectures simply consist of him going through his slides, which he does post on CCLE, along with Bruincasts of his lecture, so in that respect, you don't really need to go to class.

The class is 40% Projects (there's 7 of them), 25% Midterm, and 35% Final. Midterm and final are open note (but notes don't really help) and they're kinda tricky even though he says they aren't. Projects can be tough so I highly recommend starting early in the week and do a little by little. Cheating on them will not help because some of them require you to know your stuff.

Discussion sections are also not required to attend and if you do, you can attend any one of your choosing. And while also boring/monotonous, they do help more than Stahl's lectures.

I personally would not take a class with Stahl again. I WOULD, on the other hand, be open to having a cup of coffee or something to get to know him better, because he's seems like a great guy and his dog is very cute (<3 Pixie).

This class was good for an introductory programming class, with the professor being reasonable and helpful. As someone with no prior experience, I struggled a bit more than classmates, which meant spending a few days of the week at office hours to understand the projects better. He does not explain the projects that well in class, so make sure you ask questions in office hours, most of the TAs are very helpful. His midterm was very fair, and the final was optional (due to the coronavirus). Overall, this class definitely sparked my interest in CS.

Very simple class if you have any sort of prior experience. Programming projects were relatively straightforward and only take a few hours max. If you have no experience however, I could see it being slightly more challenging, but nevertheless this class will not be a heavy workload. Midterm and projects had a high class average, and Stahl made the final optional, so most of the class opted out of taking it.

If you have previous programming experience, this class should not be hard at all. All the lectures were bruincasted, attendance was not mandatory, and we could choose which discussion we wanted to attend, so scheduling was very flexible. Projects could take a bit of time, especially near the end, but office hours were very helpful. He can talk a bit slow, but he is overall a extremely reasonable professor and will try his best to help you succeed.

Stahl's lectures can be a bit confusing but I learned a lot. This was my first time ever programming and it was honestly pretty difficult for me, but it's definitely doable. LA/TA office hours help a lot, the LA's are more helpful and more willing to give away answers in my experience. Get started early on projects so you can ask questions before there's 50 other people in line at office hours. With all that said, Stahl is a patient and understanding person and I really appreciated him. HE ALSO BRUINCASTED THIS QUARTER which was awesome considering the class was 4-6pm.

Overall, I feel like I learned enough in this class, but I definitely could've learned much more with a better professor. Howard speaks very softly and is not very engaging, so it is difficult to stay focused in lecture. I appreciate how responsive he is to emails and admire his patience. I wouldn't try to avoid Stahl since he is likely the only option for CS31 when he is teaching it, but I wouldn't say he's one of the best professors I've had.

Professor Stahl is not the type of prof I enjoy. He talks way too slowly and might spend 30 minutes circling the same concept, making me more and more confused. Also, I don't like how Stahl doesn't really teach you how to WRITE a program. He just teaches you concepts and shows you a completed code as an example of the concept he taught. He doesn't really WRITE code with the students, so students can't really try writing codes in class.
I find the discussion sessions better than the actual lectures and I really like the TAs and LAs of this course. I honestly think Stahl made me think CS is boring. I'm glad the TAs and LAs are all cool people; they were the ones that made me enjoy CS more.
The projects itself were pretty interesting, but Stahl often misses information in his spec and adds them later on. So if you don't look closely at the class discussion board on CCLE, you might lose a point or more. Always check your file names and variable names! I lost 20 points because I named one of my files wrong on project 1, which is a project everyone got 100. But it's my own dumb mistake, he warned us over and over again in class; this mistake was really painful tho, had to make it up by getting good a midterm score.

Stahl is such a good professor to have. This class is really nice to take to get a good understanding of basic C++ coding. The part of this class I will always remember is how understanding Stahl is. He would give all points back on projects that were from stupid mistakes and he made his final optional very early on in the whole coronavirus situation. I would highly recommend him for anyone.

If you have any prior programming experience in any language, this class will be a breeze. The projects are pretty cool though, JUST DON'T MISSPELL ANY VARIABLES

Now, look here child. It doesn't matter if you've coded for years; it doesn't matter what languages you've used, any OOP data structures, any prior knowledge, shortcuts, hell even imported code or custom git repositories, nothing matters. You will be docked 80% of your grade because you forgot a single character in your return lines, and when you talk to him about it, he'll generously donate you 30% more, but nothing more.

He has cool nicknames for characters tho.
5/7 masochists would take again.