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 and linked list manipulation.

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, but may be taken into account if you're on a grading boundary. 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 any number of labs via early submission. During weeks in which labs are not graded, attendance is not required.

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.

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

The textbook for the weeks 7-13 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 7 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.

This semester, we will be using Java 7. It is already installed on the lab computers, and it may be provided with your computer as well. If it is not already installed you can download JDK 7 from the Oracle site. Information for setting up Java on your home computer will be linked in lab 1B.

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 remotely. Information for doing so will be linked in lab 1B. All of the tools we use in the course should be relatively easy to set up, except for the gjdb debugger, which will only work on Mac OS X or Linux. More on this in a later lab. Rather than working natively on your own computer, you may find it more convenient to simply use the instructional machines remotely by logging in from home. Details will provided 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, in later, team-oriented courses (as well as the real world), version-control systems help manage collaborative work.

You will be learning and using Git for this course to tracking and submit your work for grading. The first lab will teach you the basics of what you will need to know. Feel free to also read Git documentation.

Every student will receive a computer account form in the first week. More information on obtaining these forms will be announced on the course site.

You must electronically register the account you intend to use for handing in assignments (only one account, please) by the second week (by Friday's lecture). The class web page contains a link with which you can register your account and perform other adminstrative actions. Please use it to give your registration information and to generate the keys you need to work remotely and hand in homework assignments.

When logged into our instructional systems for CS 61B work, please make sure that you are using the standard configuration for the class -- that is, the files .bashrc, .emacs, etc., that should have been in your accounts initially. If you do modify these files, you are on your own.

There will be 14 labs and 9 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 git (as described in lab 1). All homeworks and labs are individual efforts.

Homeworks will be graded on correctness. Most homeworks will have two sets of automated tests. The 'release' test will be available immediately upon release of the assignment. When you submit your homework to the ag branch, you will receive an email with feedback from the 'release' test. When you are satisfied with your performance, submit your code to the submit branch. To hopefully save you from painful debugging session, your homework only needs to pass 80% of the autograder tests for full credit, except for HW7 which requires only 50%.

Edit 4/10/15: After the due date, hw may be submitted to the submit branch. Unlike hw submitted before the due date, your score will be the exact autograder score (i.e. no 80% rule) as judged by the more rigorous secret grader, with the exception of hw1/hw2/hw3 which require only 50% passage on secret tests for full credit.

We grade projects and homework on the instructional machines. Very often, you will find that for various reasons (different software versions, different operating systems), a Java program will work on your home machine, but not on ours. Be sure to test your software on the instructional machines before submission.

Lab grading schemas vary. Most labs will be on correctness, but there will be no secret tests. Some of the labs are freebies (during project weeks). Edit 4/10/15: Like HW, labs can be submitted after the deadline for full credit. Unlike HW, there are no secret tests.

Homeworks will be due at 10 PM on their respective due dates. Labs are due by 10:00 PM each Sunday after they are assigned. There is a short (unspecified) grace period for homeworks. There are no slip hours or slip days for homeworks. Your two lowest homeworks/labs will be dropped (for a total of two drops, not four). Edit 4/10/15: Any HW or lab can be resubmitted by May 4th at 11:59 PM.

Edit 4/10/15: To summarize our overly complex grading scheme:

• A HW or lab submitted to the submit branch by its deadline requires 80% correctness on the release tests for full credit, except HW7, which requires 50% correctness for full credit.
• A HW submitted after its deadline requires 100% correctness on the secret tests for full credit, except HW1/HW2/HW3 which require 50%.
• A lab submitted after its deadline requires 100% correctness on the release tests (no secret tests exist) for full credit, except lab1/lab2/lab3 which require 50%. If you forgot to submit the magic word, you can submit it now (but you should not submit magic words for labs which you did not attend).
• Projects are graded manually by humans, and must be submitted by their respective deadlines, subject to late points if turned in late.

There will be 4 larger programming projects. Projects are individual efforts, with the same collaboration rules as HW. You'll have later classes in which 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.

Each project will have three graders: 'basics', 'release', and 'secret'. The basics autograder will be running as soon as the assignment is out, and will provide verbose output. Successful completion of the basics autograder before the basics deadline will yield a point of extra credit.

The release autograder will run once per day in the days leading up to an assignment. Typically, the release tests will provide less feedback. Release tests will switch from running once per day to running continuously after the assignment deadline. The results of the secret autograder tests will not be given out, and are only used for grading purposes. As the semester progresses, the number of tests that are given as 'basic' and 'release' tests will decrease.

Projects 0, 1, 2, and 3 will be worth 10, 18, 24, and 18 points respectively. Projects 2 and 3 will each have 5 points worth of gold points. These will be especially challenging parts of the assignment. If you opt not to do the gold point parts of the projects, we will reweight your exams by 14/13ths. Edit (5/27/2015): To incentivize people who want to do only one project's gold points, we'll give you Math.max(gold2 + gold3 + exams, max(gold2, gold3) + 27/26 * exams, 14/13 * exams).

There will be two evening midterms on February 18th and April 1st, and a final exam on May 12th. You will be allowed to bring one page of handwritten notes (front and back) to midterm 1, two pages to midterm 2, and three pages to the final. Pages must be of reasonable physical dimensions. 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).

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.

Midterm (both MT1 and MT2) grades can be "shadowed" (aka a weaker version of "clobbered") 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).

With the obvious exception of emergencies, you must arrange alternative exam times well in advance. Information will be provided on how to request alternate times before each exam.

Your letter grade will be determined by the total points out of the possible 233. 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. Your final score will be the greater of the two columns shown below.