Expect to regularly put in 10 hours a week to complete homework sets, and more doing reading and reviewing lectures if you're shooting for an A. Shirts is a good professor with high expectations, although he can occasionally come off as slightly condescending.

If you put a LOT of time into this class, you're going to come out with a B. But by a lot of time, I mean around 10 hours per week, minimum. One project literally took my partner and me 24 hours (over the course of a week), and the assignment still wasn't done when we turned it in.
Pay attention to PDE's, because Ford expects you to understand that when you get to her class.

People seem to love or hate this class. Shirts is very enthusiastic and wants his students to learn well, and he's very receptive of student feedback. Overall I learned a lot in the class. The TA (Himanhsu) was excellent and in most cases did a better job explaining the problem sets than Shirts did.

How long the homework takes depends of how good you are at programming, but the tests and final are not programming based. The class is only difficult because a lot of material is covered and Shirts really makes an effort for his students to actually understand what is going on.

DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS! This class is for Shirts to show off how smart he is. Homeworks literally take 12-15 hours every single week. The tests are nearly impossible. All you do is memorize formulas that you will never use ever again. TORTURE

The only thing wrong with this class is that because we have to learn all of the complex numerical methods, the homework takes forever. Literally forever. Which takes away from most people's perspectives of the class. Shirts is a cool guy. He is very knowledgeable and very willing to help with any sort of problem you may have. Except, there really is no help for the fact that the homework takes so long and that you really would rarely have to know how MATLAB uses the numerical methods.

Shirts is an OK teacher. I think he tries to compress too much information into the lectures and makes corrections during class which was distracting. Homework and Projects were rough and didn't prepare me for the final at all. Tests and final were hell.

Tough class with a lot of material. I enjoyed this class because it was challenging but fair. It all comes down to the final though so don't rely on HW's and Projects to get a good grade because anyone can do a decent job on the HW with the help of the TA's but only few can do well on the final.

Very time consuming class. Shirts class is pretty organized the homeworks and tests require a lot of thinking out of the box though. Himanshu and the other TAs were a huge help. Shirts seems like a dick during class but he is actually pretty personable one on one and tries to improve the class

I'm going to have to agree with the first reviewer. Shirt's is all around a pretty good professor. He's a greenhorn professor, he's not going to have really polished lectures (TONS of typos) or really refined techniques. He genuinely gives a crap about making the course better... though sometimes at your sanity's expense. Really good at clarifying in office hours as long as you give the material a shot first.