<p>If I don't get any research or internships this summer, I'm planning on taking two summer courses, and right now I'm looking at EE40 and CS61BL because I really, really want to take CS61C ASAP (it looks really cool and if I do get research, I'll just take that concurrently with 61B), and I've heard EE40 during the semester isn't all that great.</p>
<p>But I am a little concerned about CS61BL. At how much of a disadvantage will I be if I take this course during summer versus a student who took CS61B during the semester (with Hilfinger)? Will it really handicap me for upper-division CS courses (as an EECS major)? Will I really have that much poorer of an understanding of the material that is covered? Will I really not be able to pass CS related interviews with the same flying colors of my colleagues who took 61B during the regular semester?</p>
<p>I’ll be taking cs61A in the fall. How hard is it? All i hear is horror stories about how 61a is a weedout class and the prof is ridiculously hard…</p>
<p>Also did you take math1b? how hard was that</p>
<p>Dragoon, I took it in the fall also. It depends honestly, but I would never say it’s a weedout class: if you’ve had decent programming experience and already feel like you have a good intuition for it, then you’ll practically breeze through. If you know how to code a bit, but don’t really feel like you’ve ever done any real programming, you’ll need to put a little work in, but in no way is it impossible. However, if you’re coming in with absolutely no knowledge of how to code, you will have a lot of trouble in the beginning. They hit the ground running (with the assumption you know how to code) and they don’t wait for you to pick up the intuition. This again by no means is impossible, but definitely will require you to work a lot harder than most of the other students in the class during the first half of the course. If this is your case, I suggest that you either brush up on some coding skills over summer or take CS10 first.</p>
<p>I’m sorry, but I didn’t take Math 1B. But definitely heed this advice: if you got a 4-5 on the Calc BC test TAKE MATH 53/54 (if you’re not engineering, then just do 54). I do know 1B is Cal’s weeder class for engineering and science, but I’ve also heard by no means was it impossible in any way (or by any means extremely difficult).</p>
<p>You almost never need language-specific programming knowledge. If you have good “general” programming knowledge you can pick up any language within a couple of hours.</p>
<p>Will you be at a disadvantage later on? It depends on your background. If you don’t have real-world programming experience or know how to code a larger project from scratch you’ll get a lot out of the real 61B. </p>
<p>If you do have real-world programming experience and maybe have worked on a couple of larger projects then I don’t think you need 61B anyway. The data structures part is very basic and will be reiterated in upper-divs if needed, or is easily looked up online. I had worked as a developer before I took 61B (with Hilfinger) and I didn’t learn anything in that class, I just hated the long assignments.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info! I took a class in high school where I had to manage a couple fairly big assignments that were in Java (nothing even close to 61B level though), but I do feel fairly confident with my ability to manage my time with large projects. I don’t really know any of the data structures stuff, but as you said, it’s pretty basic and I feel like something I could pick up over the summer. If I don’t get research, I think I’m going to go for it. If I’m just going to take 61B over the semester and not learn much except to hate the assignments, I feel like it’s something better just to do over summer.</p>
<p>I took cs61A my first semester at Berkeley with Brian Harvey (It was taught in Scheme back then which was the greatest programming language in the world since the best CS book in the world uses it (SICP) [you’ll get this joke if you watch any of Harvey’s old lectures]). Although that book is my favorite CS book and honestly it was the best CS book I’ve had from my lower division CS classes here at Berkeley). Anyway I really liked the class and didn’t think it was that bad IF YOU HAVE THE TIME TO INVEST TO MAKE SURE YOU DON’T GET BEHIND IN LEARNING THE CONCEPTS. Now you can get away with procrastination, but I wouldn’t risk it. The wonderful part about that class was that since the languages it uses are so high level, you spend most of your time thinking about concept and very little time worrying about syntax. I think I did well in the class because I paid attention in every lecture and I actually liked reading the book and working out problems in my spare time.</p>