Cannot stress this enough: READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW before you take this class.
TLDR: DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS.

Pros:
1. Pic 10B will be easier for you
2. Helpful in office hours
3. TAs are helpful usually (Swati Sharma was good)

Cons:
1. Almost everything
2. Curves according to his mood/preference. You have NO idea about your predicted grade till after the final. A 60% overall can get you an A- or a C+. Depends on him entirely.
3. (!!!) Grade bracket descriptions in his syllabus are COMPLETELY inaccurate (My percentages in HW and on the final were above the "usual" B+ grade bracket. He handed me a C with no explanation)
4. Weekly HWs are on steroids. Extremely challenging after week 3 and take 16h+
5. Exams are on steroids AND crystal meth. Extremely unnecessarily challenging
6. He is an asshole about any ways to improve your grade
7. Class pace is insanely fast. Very difficult to cope for someone with no prior C++ experience.
8. Syllabus covers MULTIPLE topics from PIC 10B. Far too complex for an intro class.
9. VERY strict about any collaboration in HWs post week 3. Uses complex algorithms to analyze all HWs and identify similarities. If you copy even 50% he WILL KNOW. Gave a "Deferred Report" to 4 students and launched an plagiarism investigation through the Dean's Office
10. Does not give a fuck about you. I submitted a HW file named "query.cpp" and got a 0 on it because he wanted it named "Query.cpp" (YES the upper case Q)
11. If you have a macbook, coding on your laptop is a huge pain. Will need to go to the PIC lab to do all your HWs and it shuts by 6pm.
12. Does not give any practice midterms or finals, so you go into the exams with no clue about the style of questions (and then get fucked lmao)

Please do yourself a favor, and do not take this class. There are hundreds of easier PIC 10a classes at UCLA. You might still end up with a A- or an A but I promise you, you will hate your life by the end of it.

This class is the worst. The professor seems to expect some previous knowledge of the class. His cut of for an A is 95. The class average for the final was 20% and he refused to curve it. He would give scores of 0 for minor mistakes. This class caused me so much pain and made me hate CS forever. I am not shocked that he has such a terrible rating. The TAs were also bad (NEVER take John Z’s section)!!!

Pros:
+ Approachable, cares about student learning
+ Frequent office hours (MWF, I think)
+ Answers questions promptly when posted to CCLE
+ No textbook required

Cons:
- Long homework (15 to 20 hrs./wk.)
- Very hard exams

Other Things to Know:
* Very strict about talking during lecture
* One homework due per week
* Exams (1 midterm, 1 final): Multiple choice, short answer, and fixing errors

DO NOT TAKE HIS CLASSES, otherwise you will regret after taking finals for sure.

I wish I hadn't underestimated the bad reviews that specifically mentioned the pacing and the workload of this course. Trying to be objective, this intro course is unnecessarily hard esp after Week 5, where weekly projects are on steroids. There's no time for you to review, study, clarify, AND pump out these coding projects after the material gets much more complex. There were useful hints given in earlier coding projects, but after a while if you don't grasp the knowledge then and there you can't succeed in this course since you're expected to build upon previous knowledge. If you take this course, devote ALL your time unless it's not a priority for you. Go to discussion, ask TAs for help, and do the exercises at the end of each powerpoint (and yes there are up to 25 exercises...like I said HUGE workload if you want to succeed).

Also, this should be a given but DON'T CHEAT. Don't submit a coding project if you need to resort to cheating. Lindstrom has a complex algorithm that will detect plagiarism and he will take action.

He's very serious about it.

Lowest 3 coding projects scores will be dropped, unless you get less than a 4/20 on the last 3. But make sure you get full marks on all of the early homeworks so the last 3 are dropped since they are very complex, the TAs are very helpful if you come upon an error while working on it (and you will come upon MANY errors that you don't understand).

Do Not Take This Professor. This class will literally consume your existence. You will spend your whole day, 6 days a week on the homework assignments which are impossible to complete without help from your TA. The next week you'll get up one morning and see that the homework you spent 20+ hours on received a 25% because you forgot to include a header in the program.
After all of this comes the final, a final so hard that the the median grade was literally a 22.5%.

If you enjoy life and don't want to spend your days listening to programming tutorials on YouTube, choose another professor. I'm pretty sure that around 20 people dropped the class.

P.S. The cutoff for an A was 97%...

It’s hell, his hw takes hours to finish. His pacing is way too quick, if you have no prior coding experience don’t take this class. The teacher is kind of nice but that does not take the fact that this class is way too difficult for a introduction class

Without previous programming experience, PIC 10A of Mike is definitely not an easy course for me. I spent almost all my free time on this course during the whole quarter and I was glad that it paid off! Although tests are designed to be hard (average around 40 or 50), you do not have to get 90 for an A. I got 80 on both midterm and final, full credits of homework and participation, and got an A. Homework projects are not hard as exams, so doing the harder exercise at the end of slides is important.
An A is challenging but definitely doable - as long as you are willing to put effort in it.

Do NOT underestimate the learning curve if this is your first CS class (as it was mine). As a STEM major, it is not like typical subjects where chapters are divided according to topic with minor overlap. The last 20% of the class material required a thorough understanding of the previously covered 80%. I.e. Do your best not to fall behind, because misunderstandings of a concept will later come to bite you QAQ.
Score Breakdown:

Homework (35%): Drop 2 out of total 6
Mini-Midterms(10%): Drop 2 out of total 4
Participation (20%): daily response form to his website
Final (35%): 85% individual, 15% groups of 4 (redo individual portion, together)

By far, this class required the most investment of my time/effort. Truly, it is not enough to simply read over the notes and homework answers and textbook. Writing the code yourself is how learning truly comes home for this class.

Take this class from literally any other professor. Oh my god.

Do not take the terrible reviews for this class with a grain of salt. I thought it would be hard, but manageable. No. This was the hardest class I have ever taken.

Homework after week 5 took me upwards of 15 hours per week. Lindstrom goes through topics EXTREMELY QUICKLY and expects you to absorb everything immediately and be able to apply it to things beyond what he goes over in class. For example, on our final, you had to have had a really good understanding of maps to get ANY CREDIT (he gave everyone that didn't have a perfect output a 0/20). He had gone over maps on the last lecture of week 10 with three slides and no examples like what we were expected to write. AND, in every homework and the final, he is EXTREMELY CONDESCENDING saying things like "this is not intended to be difficult" and "this should be very clear." It was very very discouraging.

The grading is so fucking harsh. I got 10% off a homework because there was a typo in a printed statement. That literally had nothing to do with the code itself, which I spent about 20 hours making perfect and broke down over 3 times. Again, very discouraging, and makes you feel like shit.

The amount of time I spent on this class was insane. When I told my friend what we were doing in our last few assignments, she was shocked because she hadn't learned those concepts until WELL into PIC 10B. He goes way, way too in depth for an intro class and will NOT GIVE YOU ANY CREDIT if you have hundreds of lines of code that are perfect and one line that is wrong.

Only take this class if you already know how to code or you are willing to pay for a tutor. Don't cheat, even though it will seem tempting, because he WILL catch you if you do that. I have never been so humbled in a class.