Unedited Testimonial #1 

  This is a great class on a topic that is likely to touch on some
  aspect of your research, no matter what your interests are.  For
  almost any domain that we study in CS, there is something to be
  gained by formally defining a language that lets you describe and
  reason about problems in the domain more abstractly.  This is the
  class that teaches you how to do just that.

  As for the class itself, the workload is reasonable, and perhaps more
  importantly, the homework assignments and the longer readings are
  loaded into the front half of the semester.  That way, they don't get
  in the way of doing your semester project during the second half.
  Speaking of the project, the semester projects are done INDIVIDUALLY,
  which I've never seen before in grad school but which makes it much,
  much easier to tailor the project to your own research interests.
  (Last time I checked, the purpose of graduate classes is to equip you
  to do research, after all.)  Getting back to the homeworks, the only
  assignment for this class that really takes up a lot of time is the
  final one.  However, the final assignment pays off by actually walking
  you through the development of a working bug-finding program analysis
  tool, which is a really rewarding result.

  Notes on the instructor:  Wes does tend to speak quickly, and his
  lectures are littered with geek-culture references that can be very
  amusing if you get them (and probably very distracting if you don't).
  He tries to make it very clear which parts of the material are really
  the essential things that you will need to take away and remember for
  later, and his office door in Olsson is almost always open if you want
  to go and follow up with questions about the details.

  All in all, I recommend this class.  You may find the class more or
  less entertaining depending on how well you can keep up with jokes
  taken from Babylon 5 or The Princess Bride, but you will find this
  class to be a good investment of your time no matter what.

Unedited Testimonial #2 

  Don't take this class unless you want to improve your writing skills a
  bit, listen to a few biased comments on PL research, and learn about both
  formal theory and its practical applications.  Overall this is an awesome
  class.  The instructor is energetic and smart.  He's reachable and
  willing to help.  In this class you get to learn semantics, type theory
  and a little bit theorem proving and model checking.  The basics of
  lambda calculus and functional language seems to be a prerequisite.  The
  way the homeworks were designed was also novel to me.  You get extra
  credits if your code beats others'.  Even your final presentation was
  evaluated by peers.