CS61B (semester) vs. CS61BL (summer)

Tooz
Sun, 01 Apr 2012 02:40:57 +0000

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.

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).

Hope that helps. Cheers!