Professor Stahl is a great person but it is almost impossible to sit through his lectures. If it is bruincasted which it most likely is, watch those on 2x speed. His lectures go over material and things needed for the project; nothing much else. Discussion helped me the most if you get a great TA (Angelina Poole is the best!). Projects are decent; one of mine I mistyped something when uploading a project producing a compile error and getting a 2/100. But I emailed him and he fixed the error and rerun it for me giving me a 100. He cares for his students so much, and he is super lenient with tardiness. However, he does not prepare you well for cs32... The transition from 31 to 32 (which I had Smallberg) was quite hard for me. Overall, Stahl puts his students first, and is likable; if you know the material, then projects should come by relatively easy.

I do not recommend going to lecture as you will likely zone out and not pay attention for most of the class. Stahl is eloquent in his speaking style, but his lecture style gets boring really fast. I recommend watching the bruin casts as you can manipulate the speed of the lecture. I had no coding experience coming into college, so this class was a huge adjustment for me. Luckily the tests were relatively easy, the averages being around 80. Office hours for this class are really useful, especially when working on projects. I only realized during the last week on the quarter that the textbook gives great explanations.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.