| 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.)
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.
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.
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.)
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.) |