This is a top notch course. I found it to be very informative and very well designed. My goal was to brush up on my basics programming skills to better prepare myself for a rigorous MFE program. I am very glad to say that I accomplished that goal, and more. I believe I am a much more complete and skilled programmer now, thanks to this course.
The course teaches the basics of programming and best practices of coding very well. The instructors put a special emphasis on programming best practices (like proper commenting, indentation, code block grouping and so on), which are important to learn and implement from the very start. Learning these best practices are crucial, as they will surely pay dividends to the programmer all throughout their career. The course material and assignments are also very well put together. One must code, and code a lot to get good at it. These materials push the student to do that. The assignments are challenging enough so that the student has to learn more, do their own research, try-fail and try again.
The course is also very well put together, in terms of the material covered. I have taken multiple programming courses before, but I found this one to have the best progression through topics, which is of utmost importance. I believe that a great programming course must have seamless transition between consecutive topics so that the student can get a better grasp of the concepts. Starting from a more advanced feature and moving on sporadically from that towards more primitive features is something that I saw various programming courses do. I find this to be bad practice. This course however starts from the basics, explains each feature/concept very well, points out its advantages & shortcomings; then moves on to a related concept and explains how it can be an alternative. This way, the student can better appreciate and comprehend the features of the programming language.
Lastly but most importantly, the instructor access and support is amazing and elevates the course to a new level. The TAs (Avi Palley, for me) are unbelievably fast and responsive, hence the student does not feel helpless at any point. The forums are also a great tool to learn and discuss material with peers. They simulate a real life classroom environment. Overall, the wonderful work done by the TAs coupled with the camaraderie of the students within the forums makes this course feel like an actual live course.