I've never written a Bruinwalk review but this class was so awful that I had to. I am not exaggerating when I say that as a third-year, this is the worst class I've ever taken in my life. Normally I take these reviews with a grain of salt, sometimes I think "eh maybe it was difficult for that person, but I'm sure I can handle it". No. This class is unbelievably difficult, the professor is so bad at his job that he should not be teaching, and it will break you and ruin your GPA. I am not opposed to challenging courses; students will never grow and learn if they are never challenged. This class, however, went well beyond the scope of "challenging" into "unreasonably impossible". I had to kiss goodbye to my 4.0 because of this class. Everything is so hard. The homework took at least 10 hours a week, I broke down almost every time, he does not teach well at all, has a policy where he doesn't respond to emails, and instructs his TAs not to respond to emails. The median score on his final exam was a 9/40 and he didn't curve it at all. His grading is so unreasonable, he will give 0s and dock points for minor errors. To get an A you need at least a 95% (originally his syllabus said 97%). This class is not worth the pain, tears, or effort. Please please for your sake do not take this class.

This class was incredibly difficult, and not at all an introductory course. If you're a beginner, or have very little/no prior programming experience - DO NOT take this course. To understand the material presented at the pace at which it is presented, you must have some grasp of c++ and a comprehensive understanding of the underlying logic. The course is very fast paced, and the projects require a depth of understanding and command of the language which is immensely difficult to accomplish- even with a decent amount of studying outside class time. There are no breaks between projects, and you need to begin them immediately when they are assigned in order to have enough time to complete them (projects are due on monday, while another, even harder one gets assigned that same monday). This class made my winter quarter even more miserable than it needed to be. I devoted all of my free time to studying for this class and working on projects, and still got a B.

If you take this class as a beginner to coding, it better be the only (or maybe one of 2) classes you take. The top review put it perfectly- for future coders it's a solid investment, but there's just con after con that makes it impossible for anyone taking it as a one and done requirement.
Homeworks- you WILL NOT get credit if your code does not show exactly what is asked. Example: I had a code that was almost perfect except it had a wrong calculation somewhere, so the output was off in just one portion but otherwise ran and showed everything else correctly. 0/20.
I took it with 3 other classes. Maybe that's in me, but what isn't on me is the incredibly difficult homeworks due weekly, and the speedracer pace we went through lectures at. It got to a point where I would hear people ask a question in class and I didn't even understand what they were asking, and I didn't even understand the material enough to ask my own questions.
The final, though, was my last straw. He gave us the outline for what would be expected in week 10, AFTER the chance to drop the class without notation had already passed. Had I known I would have to code a whole task, I would have dropped. I stayed up all night, only for my code to repeatedly fail or have an error after every fix I made. Had you told me this task was a homework, I would have believed you. But unlike the homework, you could not collaborate, you had no help from the TAs (despite a necessary component being something we had just learned), and it was only a 24 hour timeframe rather than a week. On the plus side? The final is worth 8% for us due to the format of the class.
In summary, don't take it if you can help it. At least not with this prof.

yeah go ahead and give us 30% on our hws even tho the code is almost perfect and 99% done except for tiny mistake here and there and expect us to write 100 lines of program even tho its an introductory class and not even give us extra credit or whatever. real funny. if ur super smart and set on to become one of the greatest coders, go ahead and take this class with him. if u just wanted an intro class that will give u confidence in ur coding skills NO if u wanna cry everyday and feel like a complete shit and drown in ur tears while no one gives a fuck and never finding out why ur code never worked YES take him

The reviews for this professor does not do him any justice. I took PIC10A with him winter of 2019 and subsequently also decided to take PIC10B again with him. I had zero coding experience (didn't even know what "Hello World" was) and did fine. He is one of the most passionate professors I've ever had and if you're looking to learn a lot about programming and leave with a strong foundation I strongly recommend this professor. However, be prepared to put in a lot of work; it reflects in your grades 100% and I practically lived in the PIC lab lol.

Materials: Visual Studios 2019
Mike teaches entirely based off his lecture notes and they are available online. The slides are elaborate and informational and while they may seem daunting because of their length it covers all the relevant material. Homework assignments must be run on visual studios 2019 which can be a pain if you have a Mac but I just downloaded XCode and would compile on VS2019 in PICLab day before to make sure it works. Hasn't failed so far.

Grading:
55% Final
25% HW (2/9 are dropped)
10% Participation (if u attend 80%+ of classes it counts as 100%)

Homeworks take a lot of time because they thoroughly test your understanding on the topic. It's not something you will be able to get done last minute (or at least it'll suck real bad). HW 6/7+ took 10+ hours but I don't think that's completely unreasonable given this is a 4 unit class + we go over tips during discussion + office hours are super helpful + discussion forum.

Previous reviews may have touched on how difficult his finals are. Yes, he writes them so that the average is around 50-60% which sounds really scary but his reasoning is as follows:
1) he curves them so it doesn't harm overall letter grade and the grade brackets are dependent on how everyone else in the class is doing (doesn't mean he limits # of A's though!!!)
2) this allows him to better understand his students and how well they are understanding course material. To score 80% on a test with an average of 50% tells him a lot more than scoring 100% on a test with an average of 80%.

Lectures: Go to lecture/discussion. There are participation questions that count toward your grade and discussions often go over tricks to do the homework assignments.

General: He's a very "tough love" kind of professor. Everything is hard af but he provides practice problems, is very helpful during office hours, and responds to the 80+ discussion forum questions every week about homeworks. He expects his policies to be followed and has built-in accommodations (ie dropping hw) that allow for mistakes, which is why he isn't very lenient on deviations so if you follow them carefully you will be fine. While he does come off as condescending in the beginning, don't let that stop you from seeking help because he will always provide it. He genuinely cares about his students and want them to learn (made a LOT of accommodations for his PIC10B class during COVID-19 and BLM movements). He isn't hard for the sake of flunking out his students; rather he aims to challenge and build good coding practices. It takes a bit of getting used to but it really set me up for PIC10B and made me enjoy coding a lot more than I would've.

For context: I have never taken a single coding class in my entire life, so this was my first exposure to coding ever.

I don't think Professor Lindstrom is a bad professor. Personally, I didn't go to every class, and I certainly didn't pay attention to all the lectures. I think if you actually go to class, take notes, pay attention, and ask questions, you'll learn a lot.

My biggest gripes with this professor were:
(1) He covered material that other professors were nowhere near approaching. We were doing streams by the time other professors were wrapping up classes. It was ridiculous and felt unnecessary.
(2) He's a bit condescending. I went to ask him questions during office hours, and he looked down on me for my question. I admit that I really didn't know what was going on, but our encounter really intimidated me from ever asking him any other questions again.
(3) The homework were extremely time consuming.

Personally, I do not recommend taking this class with this professor. He goes very, very fast and a little condescending. But if you have some experience with coding already and you're a strong independent learner, you'll do fine.

As a student who didn't have experience in programming before, PIC10 was not an easy course.
The first two weeks of material was easy, but don't underestimate the 1st mini-midterm on Week 3. Accuracy and exactness matters and a slight mistake costs you a point out of a total of 25. Plus, it is the easiest midterm out of 4 and there's a good chance that the result keeps decreasing every time so don't chill because the lowest 2 scores would be dropped.
Assignments were tough starting from the 4th one. (6 in total) It took me about 16 hours for assignment 4 even with the help of a more competent friend. Since the lowest 2 assignments were dropped from score-calculation, I didn't submit the last two assignments. Used the saved time to review instead.
Just a piece of advice: make sure you stick to the programming editor Visual Studio. Mac users could use Xcode for some practice but better do your assignments in the PIC lab (you can have 2000 pages of free printing there as well) because there are slight difference in the editors which the professor could take some points off because of it. (For example: in assignment 4, using "NULL" (used in X-code) instead of "Nullpointer" (used in VS) got me 1 point off (out of 12, which was so stupid given the long hours of work for the assignment.)
Class participation counts for 20% and if you attend every lecture then the 20% would be guaranteed. Answering 4 questions correctly in the in-class questions allows you to be absent once. So it's fine to skip once in a while because you could watch the podcast instead.
The grading scales in the course outline was a little bit terrifying. It says you get (at least) a C for scoring 77%, 86% for B and 95% for A, which would stress everyone out. However, he curves it and in the end I got 85% which is an A-. He fails at least 8% of students though. And 24% of students got C range. So it's not a course that guarantees good grade.
There's a group exam (you could choose your own group mates) for the final after the individual part that accounts for 15% of the final (assuming a higher score). It really helps you think again about the questions and really do learn from the exam as well as your friends. I like this part very much.
The professor is strict on absolute silence in lecture. Do not talk in his class. Evaluate his course on myUCLA because a higher participation rate leads to more information regarding finals. Checking his emails is a must because he sends some files through email but some on the course homepage (which is a bit messy in my opinion).
He encourages discussion on CCLE and answers EVERY SINGLE QUESTION. The TAs would also participate. It is very good for clarification of concepts and advice on assignments.
All in all, it is a good foundation C++ course and you could really understand the materials if you pay an effort.

You'd better not take his course, otherwise your upcoming quarter can be tough and to some extent, much more unpredictable. So make a decision carefully.
Basic info: The possibility of gaining an A in his course is slightly larger than zero only when you exhaust yourself. There are innumerable ways that can make you down, and when you find yourself physically and mentally trampled due to high pressure and heavy workload, it is already too late.
If you are a novice and have no expectations on GPA (or your GPA is high enough to withstand a B), please feel free to take his course. As a novice, you do learn things in his course, but the price is also high: you have to give up your spare time; you have to read his intricate and tedious notes instead of textbooks; you have to communicate with a TA at a high frequency to gain an acceptable score in each HW; you have to stay strong because of his harsh requirement and fast pace... Success does need efforts, but torturing oneself like this is definitely an unwise choice.
Also, your TA matters so much in this course. There are good and bad TAs, though. If you meet a nice one, then congrats; if a bad one, then good luck.
In the end, if you are really talented or think my words are absurd, you can always challenge yourself. Then you will LEARN far more than you can imagine: not only C++ language. That's all for now.

Do not take this class unless you have a lot of prior experience with C++. Homework takes 20+ hours every week past week 3, talking is not allowed at all during lecture, and the grading scheme is extremely harsh even for trivial mistakes. Do yourself a favor, take PIC classes with someone else, and save your grades.

And someone commented on this before, but he should really teach in the CS department. PIC is designed to teach some coding for math majors, not for computer science geniuses.

I am sorry that I cannot give Michael a higher rating... His rating should be around 3.5 if he doesn't keep the Canadian tradition of terribly difficult tests with very friendly curves.

If he ends up at UCLA CS dept I think he will be better off... PIC is really not a place where expert programmers go to.