<p>I plan on taking AP CompSci online this year. I will be a rising sophomore. Is the course difficult? I do not have prior experience at all with scripting and languages.</p>
<p>I don’t know how to say this in any other way</p>
<p>You do not need prior experience, but it’s also not something easily taught. If you bet on your luck, you might get a good teacher who knows that teaching AP CS requires a totally different mindset than teaching something like Calc.</p>
<p>Essentially, what you’ll definitely be able to learn from AP CS is how to read programs. But if you’re lucky to have a good teacher, you may also pick up how to write programs. If you can tell that your teacher either doesn’t give a crap or don’t really seem to be able to explain how he came up with the code to some program, you’re gonna have a bad time because you’ve gotta be willing to teach yourself/develop that thought process, if you care that is.</p>
<p>To put it crudely: for some it’s natural, for others it could be a hellish nightmare. It mostly just depends on how willing you are to “get” it, and by extension, how interested you are in the subject.</p>
<p>Without any prior experience with compsci, I took an honors course this past year that covered almost all of the topics of the AP course, and I did better than most if not all of the others in the class. Like failboat said, a good instructor will not only get you to read programs well but also make you able to write your own code. My teacher had a lot of background on compsci so I was able to pick up a lot from him. </p>
<p>I’d recommend a decent grasp of mathematics to help understand the material, for example the way a method/routine is like a function, and of course to perform mathematical operations by hand to debug applications, in some cases.</p>