Agreed; I took this the first time around and had a great time. Highly recommended! :)
For what it's worth, Sipser's _Introduction to the Theory of Computation_ helped me get through some of the gnarlier spots (and in turn, the lectures through some of the harder parts of the book). I picked up a used copy of the 2nd edition cheap off Amazon (it was sub-$20 iirc).
As you might expect from a course by Ullman, it's heavy on theory and detail.
People are right to say that this is a core topic in computer science, and I'd recommend it to people who like CS conceptually and are curious about the parts beyond programming. Automata come up everywhere!