Overall, I would say folks may not have appreciated him as much in those lectures as you might expect (if you've watched the online versions of them, they were

Overall, I would say folks may not have appreciated him as much in those lectures as you might expect (if you've watched the online versions of them, they were basically the same as those...unfortunately we probably weren't the most active class participants either with everything else going on in each student's day-to-day life). I actually learned more about his personality by reading Simply Scheme for the precursor class to CS61A (CS3) since I was a complete noob to programming at the time...his book was really fun to read though and I learned a lot that semester. I think I ended up reading a couple of Brian's essays on his UCB page as well, which helped me gain some additional appreciation for his background. A few years later I picked up a copy of the book Hackers (by Steven Levy) and it was there (during the section about the early days of the MIT Hackers) that I saw his name mentioned and I thought it was so cool that I had had him as an instructor :-).