Had a similar experience. Came in to college with very little programming background and wasn't sure if CS was right for me. Truly enjoyed CS61A and how simply it worked up from primitives to explain more complex concepts over time in an approachable way. The best part was no hand waving and everything was fully explained.

I had previously tried to learn Java as my first language and never could make sense of all of the "public static void main(String[] args)" and handwaving involved to write a simple hello world.