CS 1110

Sherriff is not as awesome and nice as portrayed here. He's really condescending when you ask for help and treats you as if you're really stupid a lot of the time. He can be funny, but the way he responds to questions makes you not want to ask them. It's an OK class.

Great class, sherriff is the man although he can snap if you piss him off. I would definitely recommend this class to anyone who has little to no coding expirience

Mark Sherriff is a great professor. He's entertaining and introduces programming in a way that makes it fun and makes everyone want to be a CS major. I seriously recommend this class to everyone, regardless of your major. Knowing how to write basic programs in Java is a useful skill for anyone to have.

The class was a good introduction to computer science. The last couple homeworks were very difficult as a whole, but doable with help from TAs/professors. Sherriff is awesome and does a really good job teaching a concept which most people are unfamiliar with when entering the class.

Being a non-engineer, this course sucked. The amount of time it took to get decent grades really wasn't worth it considering I have no interest in continuing with a CS education. The material was pretty cool, but the way that material was tested sucked. You end up spending a majority of your Mon-Wed afternoons in the TA Office Hours scrambling to finish weekly homework assignments. Exams were OK if you know your stuff, but if coding doesn't come naturally to you it pretty much blows. The way the grading works, everyone does better than they expect to at the start of the course. Sherriff is a pretty corny guy. He lecture well, and wants everyone to understand the material. If you are an upperclassman taking this class, you realize that its packed with a bunch of first year engineers who got a 5 on their AP exams. So be prepared to feel incompetent.

Super fun class, NOT fun when there is one hour left to turn in your homework and your program has a little bug. I'm not in E-school and I didn't find this class very hard. Do well on homeworks, because they are a HUGE chunk of the grade. Also, don't forget the weekly collab quizzes. I found Sherrif to be very funny and quirky in class, but rather condescending and just bleh outside of class. The TAs...some are terrific, some are useless.

Advice for all: don't bother with the book. I never bought it, and never felt the need for it.

CS 1110 can be a difficult course if you don't stay on point. Assignments start off relatively easy. Get in the habit of starting them early because they will get harder. Though it's never too overwhelming, and there are always TAs to help.
Prof. Sherriff was exceptional, and it's a shame he's no longer teaching the intro course, but Tychonievich is also intelligible and fun.
Overall, I recommend this course. Not too difficult if the right effort is put forth, but still a challenge.

It seems like whether you will enjoy this class is dependent on how interested you are in the field in general, so I would definitely recommend this class if you are interested in the topic. Whether or not you like Sherriff also seems to be dependent on how interested in comp sci: CS students love him and other people seem not to. He can be pretty quirky at times and I felt he was a pretty good lecturer. Overall though, it's an easy and fun class.

Pretty good class- take it if you have any interest in CS at all. Sherriff is a good professor in class, but the stereotype holds true that he can be kind of brunt and impolite during his office hours. Nevertheless, the class (at least Fall 2014) consisted of 15 homework assignments, 2 partner projects, 2 midterms, and a final. Nothing was overtly difficulted. Ended up with an A even though I did not put in too much effort at all.

CS 1110 with Sherriff was definitely the best class I've taken since I've come to UVA. Sherriff has a knack for explaining very technical concepts in a easy to understand way and is also very very funny. While I've heard he can get a little short in office hours, he does warn you early on that office hours (including TAs) are meant for specific questions and not general code review. Overall, I found from personal experience that not going to office hours, but debugging and figuring out problems on my own was incredibly useful and made me feel not only more fluent in Java, but better as a programmer (made assignments and studying for tests less hard).

This class I feel is phenomenally run considering that there were close to 400 students in it. All expectations are very clear, assignments were adequately described, and tests did not deviate a lot from the material Sherriff said would be on the test. I highly recommend going to and paying attention in class. Not only is Sherriff a great teacher, but he often poses practice coding questions in class that we work on. He gives great insight into the best ways to solve those problems, which is at the end of the day is what the main challenge of computer science is. The TA's are very helpful and the projects all push students to learn the material even better. I also recommend staying on top of the material from the get-go. Make sure everything at the beginning makes completely sense, because everything really does build on each other. If you have a weak foundation, all the concepts at the end of the class are not going to make sense. Grading is extremely fair and the process for getting tests back and getting points back on tests is extremely efficient and thorough.