This class will kick you in the teeth and make you swallow a pint of blood before burying you alive. Michael Lindstrom, who is, in all fairness, a good guy and a smart person, had us cover way too much stuff. If you are considering enrolling in PIC 40A taught by Michael Lindstrom: don't. If you do, I cannot save you. PIC classes are often taught by Miroshnikov. Take classes with him, he is way more realistic with the ammount of work he gives.

This class was brutal. I may have been able to get a better grade if I took ONLY this class. We covered HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the essentials of web programming. But we also spent the other half of the class cramming in PHP and MySQL, as well as wasting time on jQuery. Just save yourself, I am warning you now.

I feel I gained a lot from this class. You do learn a lot of languages. However, Professor Lindstrom was completely unrealistic and lacking empathy in his structuring of the course, especially in terms of test schedules and workload; it's as if he assumed his class was the only one we were taking. In the final 2 weeks of the course we had a unit test, a homework due, the final project due, our final project presentations, and the final exam. Just stay on top of stuff because his sweet, helpful demeanor is totally undercut by his ludicrous expectations of his students. Yes he curves the hell out of it at the end, but the stress of those last 2 weeks makes that irrelevant. The final exam average was 43%. I don't understand why he doesn't just restructure the course so that people don't fail everything and he doesn't have to curve it so much.

I wanna start out saying I took this class during the COVID-19 Pandemic so this may not be reflective of the actual course in class. With that said, I really enjoyed PIC 40A. I had a little prior experience with HTML which made the learning curve a tad easier but overall I think it is a really good course. You definitely learn a lot and I think there are a bit of pacing issues. He tries to squeeze SQLite3 in there at the last week which isn't terrible but I don't think it gives justice to databases. Overall the breakdown for the course was as follows:
78% HW (6 assignments - Lowest one dropped [changed to lowest two dropped because of BLM])
20% Participation (Graded on completion and effort and 90% raw score warrants a 100% in this category)
2% Final!

He has to be the most accomodating and nicest professors I have ever had even giving us an extension on HW 4 which I thought was the hardest assignment. His homework assignment and participation activities really make you internalise and think about the material and are very fair. Be warned that sometimes I would spend about 30 hours on a HW assignment and there is a noticeable difficulty spike around week 6-7. You don't need to look any additional methods up and all the notes were posted. I stopped going to lecture because the class was 8am and everything was recorded and posted to CCLE.

In terms of Office Hours, he is very helpful and would highly encourage people to take advantage of them.

Our TA was pretty good and knew what he was talking about. I don't think he necessarily made a big impact on teaching me new material but he did clarify somethings and was willing to help during his office hours.

Overall, I would HIGHLY recommend taking this class and is one of the only classes where I can clearly see that the material I learned will directly help me in the industry.