You don't need coding experience. You don't need to go to lecture because they just go over theoretical stuff. Discussion can sometimes be a waste because they elaborate on theory and work on similar problems. GO TO LABS they help you a lot with the code and it is the best place to ask questions. Some projects can be really weird and time consuming but if you start like halfway from the due date it'll be more than fine. USE THE TAs when you run into issues. Reports get REALLY annoying, but the grading for both report and code is extremely lenient.

Honestly, Professor Ruter didn't help much in the class with the code, but he was super helpful on the discussion section on Bruinlearn and on email, and replied super fast, and was super nice about it. THe final was this scuffed dynamics problem that was totally out of the scope of the class. It wa important to go to lecture then because he would give some equations you needed. That project sucked but he gave us an extension which was cool. Overall good class.

The class itself is easy but the assignments do take some time. Lectures and discussions basically outline all of the code for you so if you have any prior experience, this class should be extremely easy. Lectures and discussions were both very useful in solving the assignments so take a look before you start. Grading on the lab reports are pretty lenient. There were 7 total lab reports and 1 final project which is ~2 labs worth of work.

I was really worried before taking this class because I had absolutely no coding experience but honestly I was worried for nothing. The first 2 assignments were a rough learning curve simply because I had zero experience and didn't really know what to do at all, but they were simple enough that I did well on them. Following those first 2 homework assignments, I learned to really utilize the discussion forums and the lab recordings. The discussion forum is super helpful and the professor or one of the TA's usually answers really quickly and you can usually get your problem resolved with that. I would HIGHLY recommend watching the lab recordings. The TA's provide a lot of pseudocode and explanation that I would not have been able to solve the homework without. If your TA isn't super helpful, you can always watch another TA's videos because one of the benefits of having everything recorded and posted is that you can refer to other TA's.