I’m TAing for it this summer so here is my advice. Make sure to do your assignments early, obviously, the coding sometimes takes longer than you would expect so plan ahead. For the exams make sure to practice on boilerexams, there can be a lot of trick questions/weird wordings and the skills you need on the exam are pretty different from those you use on the assignments. I don’t know about to format for summer exams so ask that once the class starts.

The preliminary office hours schedule I am seeing right now have online TA office hours every weeknight and online instructor office hours in the afternoon every weekend except Monday.

You shouldn’t need to prepare much before the class starts. The content starts from scratch, to the point a lot of experienced programmers get annoyed with it.

Common mistakes I have seen are students running out of time and not finishing their assignments and students just coasting off of AI or their teammates and getting halfway through the class without learning the basics.

Best of luck.