<p>I'm a transfer student taking classes in the summer. I know that it will be difficult...there are about 18 hours of classes a week including lecture, discussion and lab. How many hours will I have to spend doing reading, homework, projects and studying a week to get As in the classes? Any EECS or CS majors please give an insight on the difficulty level. I have a Java background and I took 2 semesters of Data Structures at my CCC.</p>
<p>CS 61A is very different from your typical CS class. The Java background probably won't help you much here, except perhaps allow you to be able to pick up Scheme more quickly than your peers (it's already a very straightforward and stripped-down language.)</p>
<p>Having knowledge in data structures will certainly help you in the second part of the course. You will be introduced to two (and only two) major data structures in Scheme: the pair (which is basically the building block of the linked list) and the tree.</p>
<p>My strategy was to get all the points I could in the first half of the course, because it's very easy compared to the second half. (The exams are weighted equally, except the final.) When you get into stuff like state and mutations and environment diagrams and evaluators, those topics are actually very, very hard and conceptually difficult to understand. </p>
<p>Weekly homeworks can take anywhere from five minutes up to hours. They are graded on effort, so you can just BS them and get your 2 points (0.66% of final grade) on each assignment -- but that isn't conducive to your learning. If you do BS your homework, be sure to read and understand the solutions after they are posted. Four projects take 2-6 hours each; the latter two are done in teams of 2 and are really not that bad (especially given your programming background.)</p>
<p>Unless you're very, very confident, you do NOT want to take EE 42 and CS 61A concurrently in the summer. Check my post history for a detailed description of EE 40, which is basically the same class as EE 42 except without the MOSFETs in the last part of the course. (I read for EE 42, so I'm familiar with it.)</p>
<p>don't be a wuss, take EE40, it includes lab and a final project.<br>
I did the first project in cs61a to prepare myself since bioE usually take 61a anyway. The car, cdr op is nothing like what you learned in Java.</p>
<p>I definitely don't recommend taking both over the summer especially if you want A's. Java doesn't help you much in 61A (actually it's kinda the other way around, which is why 61A is before 61B). The projects are pretty long, homeworks are BSable like Student said, and the reading is pretty dry. The material gets really confusing at times. It's based a lot on theory so you're not just coding all the time.</p>
<p>EE42 is also a class I found to be very dense and confusing. The concepts aren't easy to grasp. I wouldn't bother taking EE43 because it'll just suck up a lot more of your time and you don't have to take it (assuming you're doing CS). With these two classes you'll spend a lot more time trying to figure out what's going on rather than doing tons of busywork. So I think you'll need a lot of time to go to office hours, review homework solutions, review midterms, stuff like that.</p>
<p>Oh yeah, don't listen to middsmith. EE42 is hard enough. Don't make your life harder than it has to be.</p>