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Comment by pamelafox | Hacker News Reader

I was the most recent instructor of 61A and just wrote up tips on auditing it: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2022/07/how-to-audit-cs61a.html However, I don't recommend 61A for folks new to programming, it's better as a second course.

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I took it when I was an undergrad (that was ten years ago, but I hope the spirit remains the same) as my first CS class. It was very tough given my preparation, but the thing I appreciated was that it gave a very general introduction to many high-level concepts in fairly good detail. I felt I had a solid starting point in many things- programming paradigms, understanding data abstractions, levels of abstraction in program design, etc that I don't always see replicated in other introductory material.

I took 61a under DeNero as a transfer with high school APCS and college intro class experience, since the dept didn't let me waive the scheme/lisp part. And I was shocked at difficulty, like "no way kids programming for the first time as freshmen can keep up with his course pace"

Hm I took it under someone else so I’m not sure what it’s like these days. Sad that it has such a reputation.. I was able to ace the course and transfer into EECS my freshman year, so things probably have gotten much harder in the last ten years.

I remember some kind of test to get into it (1997) which asked people to write a recursive function (I think it said something like "please write a recursive function in the programming language of your choice"). If you could do this, you could take CS 61A; otherwise, you were asked to take CS 3.

Alternative to the recursive function question, was also one testing mathematic induction (1999). I didn't know enough CS or Scheme to get into CS61A, but they were fine with getting the underlying concept in a language that was safer to assume people were familiar. (I wasn't lucky enough to have any CS or programming courses in high school unlike most of my classmates.)

Oh yeah, I think that was on the 1997 test too... I think it may have been something like "please write a recursive function in the language of your choice, or prove a property of integers by mathematical induction".

I don't remember if there were suggestions (like factorial for recursion or a summation formula for induction).

At that time it was taught by Brian Harvey. I liked him a ton. I know there have been other excellent 61A teachers, too.

i dont think writing a recursive function is that hard; it takes an hur of instruction to be able to do this.

Some students supposedly require weeks of instruction and/or practice in order to be able to use variable assignment!

If there's a kind of instruction that reliably teaches students as a whole to write recursive functions successfully in just an hour, that will be a great advance for computer science education.

@schoen: there is. the problem with traditional teaching methods is that they start from the ground up, without providing a motivation. I would be seriously worried about the state of a world whose denizens need a week or so to learn variable assignment! :)

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