This paper aims at providing a practical iterative learning control (ILC) scheme for a wide class of heat transfer systems in the sense that it avoids high-gain learning of ILC, thus a potential non-monotonic convergence issue, and the risk of violating the hardware limitation of input profile in implementation. Meanwhile, the ILC scheme guarantees the identical initial condition of heat process. As a result, the output tracking precision may be improved while not reducing the anticipatory step size as in [1]. All the benefits of the proposed ILC scheme are achieved by applying a heuristic selection algorithm for the anticipatory step size and rectifying the output reference simultaneously.