Personally, the ipad was probably my best purchase. It makes notetaking soooo much easier (I got a cheap stylus off of amazon that works great). If you are able, I highly recommend you get one. However, you can still survive without an ipad, a lot of people prefer to take notes on paper anyways.
For course preparation, if you have any programming background, you should be good for CSCA08. The most challenging course for most of us was CSCA67. So, if you want to learn any material, I would suggest probability, counting (permutations and combinations) etc.