The CS 61 series is an introduction to computer science, with particular emphasis on software and machines from a programmer's point of view. CS 61A covered high-level approaches to problem-solving, providing you with a variety of ways to organize solutions to programming problems as compositions of functions, collections of objects, or sets of rules. In CS 61B, we move to a somewhat more detailed (and to some extent, more basic) level of programming.

In 61A, the correctness of a program was our primary goal. In CS61B, we're concerned also with engineering. An engineer, it is said, is someone who can do for a dime what any fool can do for a dollar. Much of 61B will be concerned with the tradeoffs in time and memory for a variety of methods for structuring data. We'll also be concerned with the engineering knowledge and skills needed to build and maintain moderately large programs.

This class assumes you have taken CS61A, CS61AS, or E7, or have equivalent background to a student who has taken one of these courses. The course is largely built upon the assumption that you have taken CS61A or CS61AS, and E7 students may find the beginning of the course to be a bit scarier, particularly when it comes to object oriented programming.

We assume you are coming in with zero Java experience. Nonetheless, we will move through basic Java syntax very quickly. Though the syntaxes of Java, Python, MATLAB, Scheme, etc. are enormously different, the underlying computational models are surprisingly similar.

If you already have Java experience, great! We hope that you'll help out your fellow students in discussion, lab, and on Piazza, particularly in the opening weeks when everyone is catching up on Java.

It would be nice, though not absolutely necessary, to have some UNIX experience before the semester starts. All the instructional machines for this course will be running various flavors of the UNIX operating system (generally, Ubuntu) and it's a really good idea for you to become familiar with it. There will be online resources for learning Unix linked from the 1st lab. We will also announce on-campus help sessions on the announcements section of this website. If you'd like a physical reference, Paul Hilfinger suggests A Practical Guide to The Unix System (3rd edition) by Mark Sobell (Addison-Wesley, 1994).

This is a course about data structures and programming methods. It happens to also teach Java, since it is hard to teach programming without a language. However, it is not intended as an exhaustive course on Java, the World-Wide Web, creating applets, user interfaces, graphics, or any of that fun stuff.

Some of you may have already had a data structures course, and simply want to learn Java or C++. For you, self-study may be a better option. CS 9F (C++ for programmers) and CS 9G (Java for programmers) are both one-unit self-paced courses that will teach you more of what you want to know in less time. There is no enrollment limit for that course, and you work through it at your own pace after the first and only lecture.

Finally, the 1-unit self-paced course CS 47B is for students "with sufficient partial credit in 61B," allowing them (with instructor's permission) to complete the 61B course requirement without taking the full course.

Each week there is a 1 hour discussion section and a 2 hour lab section headed by a GSI and supported by volunteer lab assistants. Information about the staff running each section can be found on the staff page.

If you decide to permanently switch sections, it'd be best to switch in Telebears. However, if the section is officially full or doing so would somehow cause you significant grief, it's OK to simply clear it with the two TAs involved.

Attendance is optional for discussion. However, your overall level of effort and participation may be taken into account if you're on a grading boundary, and getting to know your discussion TA is one way to demonstrate effort and participation. Lab attendance is mandatory and missing a lab will result in a 10% penalty to that week's lab, though if you submit the lab early (by 10:00 PM on Wednesday), you may skip lab that week. You may skip attending any number of labs via early submission. During weeks in which labs are not graded, attendance is not required. Lab deadlines on gradescope will always reflect the "true" deadline (in the event that we need to push anything back for reasons like technical glitches).

Labs will be online, so you will be able to do much of the work ahead of time. Nonetheless, we encourage you to attend your scheduled lab time. One major purpose of the labs is to give your TA a chance to check up on you and to find out what people are and are not understanding. We've found that with the increasing ability to work anywhere has come an increasing tendency for students to go off by themselves and fall behind. Don't make this mistake. Keep up with homework and lab work and above all let us know when you don't understand something!

The course home page will provide one-stop shopping for course information. The course schedule as well as all handouts, homework, labs, FAQs, etc., will be posted there.

Our discussion forum this semester will be Piazza. For most questions about the course, Piazza is the right place to ask them. The course staff read it regularly, so you will get a quick answer. Furthermore, by posting online as opposed to emailing us directly, other students benefit by seeing the question and the answer. Don't forget to check Piazza before asking your question, just in case someone else has already posted it.

The e-mail address cs61b@inst.eecs.berkeley.edu will send a message to the course staff (Josh and the TAs). You can use it for correspondence that you don't want to send to Piazza. We all read it, so you will usually get a quick reply. If you send a question that is of general interest, we may post the response on Piazza (we will keep personal information out of it, of course).

To talk with us, the best way is to come during regular office hours (posted on the home page). Many of us are available at other times by appointment. Please don't be shy. Web pages, email, and Piazza are useful, but it's still much easier to understand something when you can talk about it face-to-face. Office hours are concentrated Monday to Wednesday because we hold labs all day Thursday and Friday.

The optional textbook for the first seven weeks of this course is Head First Java, 2nd Edition by Sierra and Bates (O'Reilly, 2005). This book is recommended to those of you with no Java experience. It's an easy read and super cheap for a textbook.

The optional textbook for the weeks 8-14 of the course is Algorithms, 4th Edition by Wayne and Sedgewick.

Both textbooks for this course are optional. Homework will not be assigned from them, and alternate readings will be provided when possible.

Head First Java is not a reference book (it says so on page xxii). The official description of the Java core language is available online in The Java Language Specification (Java SE 8 Edition) by James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy Steele, Gilad Bracha, and Alex Buckley. It's extremely thorough and easy to read (once you understand how to read it).

This course does not have an official text editor. You may use Vim, Emacs, Sublime, or IDEs like Eclipse, Netbeats, IntelliJ, Sublime, etc. Whatever you use, however, your submitted solutions must conform to our expected layouts, as indicated in the assignments. We strongly recommend that you use IntelliJ starting as soon as you finish project 0. We will not officially support any IDE other than IntelliJ.

This semester, we will be using Java 8. It is already installed on the lab computers, and it may be provided with your computer as well.

You will be able to do any work you'd like on any Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux computer. You may also remotely log into the instructional machines (which you will receive an account for during the first week), though you should be able to most everything in the course by working natively on your own computer. Information for setting up your own computer is linked in lab 1b.

We'll be using the version-control system Git for keeping and tracking your work. Version-control systems allow you maintain a series of "snapshots" of your files at various points in their development. Used properly, this provides you some back-up protection, so that you can recover previous states of your work when something goes wrong. Also for team-oriented projects (as well as in the real world), version-control systems help manage collaborative work.

You will be learning and using Git for this course to track your work. This will allow the staff to track your progress in the course. The first lab will teach you the basics of what you will need to know. Feel free to also read Git documentation.

There will be 14 labs and 7 homeworks. Labs will take approximately two hours to complete, though some may run slightly longer. HWs will vary from 3 to 10 hours of work. You will turn in everything electronically using Gradescope. All homeworks and labs are individual efforts (without partners).

Homework will be graded on a rigorous suite of correctness tests while labs will receive full credit for "reasonable effort," as evaluated by a small number of relatively simple correctness tests.Passing all tests on Gradescope for homework or labs will ensure full credit as there are no hidden tests.

No extensions or grace hours will be granted for labs or homework except in cases of emergency (with require instructor approval). To allow for situations that may arise in the course of life, the lowest two homework assignment will be dropped and the two lowest labs will be dropped.

There will be 4 larger programming projects. The first two projects will be optionally pair partner projects. The other two projects will be individual efforts, with the same collaboration rules as HW. You'll have later classes which will provide more opportunities to build your teamwork skills. For 61B, our goal is to help you build the independence and fundamental skills that you'll need to thrive when building large programs.

Project 0 and 1 will be relatively easier than projects 2 and 3, taking less time and with greater levels of scaffolding. Project 2 will be a very difficult project (on par with what you might expect from Hilfinger's harder projects). Project 3 will be challenging, but not as time consuming as project 2.

For Project 0, we will release all tests that determine your grade. In other words, passing all tests on Gradescope will allow you to earn full points for the autograded portion of the project.

The other three projects will have some restricted tests which will not be report to students on Gradescope. Thus, passing all tests on Gradescope will not necessarily guarantee receiving full points on the autograded portion of the project. This is intended to encourage you to write your own tests to provide a more complete test suite.

Projects 0, 1, 2, and 3 will be worth 10, 25, 40, and 25 points respectively. There will be optional extra credit opportunities for projects 1 and 2. EDIT: There was a note here about an extra credit opportunity for project 3, but this was moved into the end-of-semester survey points.

There will be two evening midterms on February 12th and March 31st and a final exam on May 11th. You will be allowed to bring one letter size page of handwritten notes (front and back) to the first midterm, two to the second midterm, and three to the final. You will not be required to turn in these sheets, and you may reuse them from exam to exam. Inspired by the great Paul Hilfinger tradition, exams may cover any material whatsoever. For fear of our lives, exams will almost exclusively test material covered in the course.

Inevitably, some of you will have conflicts with the scheduled exam times. We will arrange for alternative test times for those people who have sufficient cause. Sufficient cause includes conflicting exams for other courses, medical or family emergencies, or important religious holidays (however, we believe we have avoided all of those).

We will provide a form several weeks before each exam for students to request alternate exams, which will almost certainly occur after the regular exam has occurred. With the obvious exception of emergencies, you must fill out this form by the provided deadline to be considered for an alternate exam.

Popular reasons that are not sufficient cause include having job interviews, having a plane ticket that you (or your parents) bought without consulting the schedule, having exams or assignments in other courses at nearby times, being behind in your reading, being tired, or being hung over.

We release grades for exams on Gradescope. If you believe we have misgraded an exam, request a regrade on the same site with a note explaining your complaint. You should check the online solutions first to make sure that this regrade will make your total score go up as it is possible to lose points from a regrade request.

If you do especially poorly on Midterm 1 (fewer than 10 points), then you will have an opportunity to take a makeup midterm 1 that can boost your score to a maximum of 10 points. Your midterm 1 score will be the better of your actual midterm 1 and the makeup.

If your midterm grades are statistically much worse than your final, we'll replace your midterm grade.

Midterm (both MT1 and MT2) grades can be "shadowed" (aka a weaker version of what Dan Garcia calls "clobbering") by the final. The way it works is that if you are X standard deviations from the mean, your midterm scores will be replaced by a score equivalent to X - 0.5 standard deviations from the mean. This policy can only help, and cannot hurt your score.

Effectively, this only applies if you improve substantially on your final: an improvement of over 0.5 standard deviations.

For example, suppose Bilbo scored 0.4 standard deviations above the mean on MT1, 0.9 standard deviations above the mean on MT2, and 1.1 standard deviations above the mean on the final. Then Bilbo's midterm scores will be replaced by 1.1 - 0.5 = 0.6 standard deviations above the mean, as long as this is an improvement.

Since Bilbo already got 0.4 above the mean on MT1, his score would be replaced by 0.6. However, his score on MT2 would not be changed (since he is already 0.9 above the mean).

As another example, suppose Bilbo is -1.1 above the mean on MT1, -0.1 on MT2, and 0.3 on the final, his midterm scores would be replaced by -0.2 (0.3 - 0.5) if that helps. In Bilbo's case, his MT1 score would be replaced by -0.2, and MT2 score would be untouched (since it is already better).

Or in pseudocode:

your_devs = (your_final_score - final_mean) / final_stddev
your_potential_replacement = (your_devs - 0.5) * midterm_stddev + midterm_mean
your_shadowed_midterm_score = max(your_midterm_score, your_potential_replacement)

Your letter grade will be determined by the total points out of the possible 384. In other words, there is no curve. Your grade will depend solely on how well you do, and not on how well everyone else does.

Category	Percentage	Points
Homework/Labs	~22%	84
Projects	~26%	100
Midterms	~26%	100
Final Exam	~26%	100
Total	100%	384

A+	A	A-	B+	B	B-	C+	C	C-	D+	D	D-	F
374	348	327	309	285	270	248	215	184	160	135	100	0

University guidelines suggest that the average GPA for a lower-division required course be in the range 2.5 - 2.9, with 2.7 (B-) being typical. This corresponds to getting 55% on tests (typical for past exams), 75% on projects, and 100% on homework and lab assignments.

We will grant grades of Incomplete only for dire medical or personal emergencies that cause you to miss the final, and only if your work up to that point has been satisfactory. Do not try to get an incomplete simply as a way to have more time to study or do a project. That is contrary to University policy.