<p>Should I take CS 3S if i have no programming experience or should I just go ahead and take Cs 61A??</p>
<p>i would recommend cs 3L first…</p>
<p>cs3s is ****-the tutors at the self pace center dont help out at all. and you will be lost in 61a without prior programming experience/or cs3s or 3L</p>
<p>^ I don’t think CS 3L exists anymore, at least not this semester.</p>
<p>^ CS3L was offered during the summer, but not during the fall.</p>
<p>The only course available this semester is 3s :(</p>
<p>Yeah, I took CS3L last spring and Harvey said that they are gonna permanently shut down CS3L.</p>
<p>I have no programming experience. Should I take CS 10 or CS 3S as a precursor to 61A? Which of the two would be a better precursor?</p>
<p>3S, no question.</p>
<p>I took CS61a without programming experience and did fine. Most people do. Don’t worry about it.</p>
<p>CS10 has nothing to do with CS. CS3s just sucks.</p>
<p>3S does suck, but two of two people I know who had little/no programming experience were helped immensely by it. One of those was taking 61a but dropped to take 3S. So perhaps go to 61A, then see what happens.</p>
<p>61a is possible without 3, but the first 2-3 weeks are going to be hell. If you manage to survive that long, then you’ll pretty much be caught up with the people who took cs3.</p>
<p>CS3S if you have time. CS10 is for non-majors. But CS61A is do-able without CS3S</p>
<p>Alternatively, you can spend the summer previewing CS 61A using the information in the [course</a> home page](<a href=“http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp11/]course”>CS 61A Home Page). That includes webcast lectures and textbooks (free on the web). The MIT Scheme interpreter can be downloaded so that you can install it on your computer and do the exercises and examples in the books.</p>
<p>^ I dunno if that’ll help him much… I’ve heard that Harvey isn’t teaching next semester, and that they might be using Python… Can anyone confirm this?</p>
<p>I don’t think Python’s gonna be used just yet, but Harvey is not teaching next semester.</p>
<p>I’m in CS10 this semester and Dan Garcia said in lecture today that CS61A will use Python starting Fall '11 (Harvey is not teaching it).</p>
<p>So that kind of changes everything in terms of “preparing.”</p>
<p>But for what it’s worth, CS10 kind of sucked. It doesn’t fulfill any requirements, you get hardly any instruction in actual programming, and it’s a new course that’s still pretty disorganized.</p>
<p>Yep, I’m in CS10 too and they’re definitely using Python in the fall.
So you’d probably be better off taking 9H, the self-paced course for Python. </p>
<p>But I’m gonna have to disagree about CS10 being useless. You learn a lot about recursion and higher order functions, which is what you need for 61A. I guess it depends on how you learn best, though. It’s true there isn’t a lot of “actual” programming (as in typed out).</p>
<p>My mistake. I didn’t know Python was taking over so soon. Man, I wish I could TA CS61A now that it’s Python, haha.</p>
<p>A student who previews the Scheme-based CS 61A over the summer should still be well prepared for the CS concepts in the actual course even if it uses Python. The student can also pick up a [Python</a> book](<a href=“http://wiki.python.org/moin/IntroductoryBooks]Python”>IntroductoryBooks - Python Wiki) and learn the language as well.</p>
<p>So basically the best way to prepare, for those of us with no programming exp. taking it in the fall should just pick up a book?</p>
<p>From the list ucbalumnus mentioned, are there any personal recommendations? I really want to do well in the class.</p>