[realjohng]

Disagree too. These courses were also known as “weeder” courses so less students do the major, which can’t support all the interested students, so they’re overly difficult. Anyone learning, I would start with JavaScript and make small fun stuff.

[jedberg]

They weren't overly difficult. They were just the same difficulty as the rest of the CS classes at Cal. If you couldn't pass these you wouldn't pass any other CS course.

[aripickar]

I don’t think they were the same difficulty at all as some of the upper divs. Classes like CS 170 (Efficient Algorithms), Cs 189 (ML) and CS 182 (Deep Neural Networks) were all significantly more difficult than any 61 series class.

[gamblor956]

The CS61 series was excessively difficult compared to the upper-level material, and it was absolutely because it was intended to weed people out of the major.

I got A's in all of my upper-level CS courses at Cal. Cryptography and compilers were a breeze compared to the CS61 courses. My average grade in the CS61 series was a B-. The semester I took CS61B (data structures), my grade on the final was 21, out of 100. The average grade was 16, and the highest score was 35. (The 35 is a VC now and is fairly active on HN.)

[fdye]

I once saw a young lady in the lab in Soda hall getting obviously frustrated. A few moments later she exclaimed, "Why is it so f**ing hard!" and then as if in a cartoon slammed her forehead into the lab computers keyboard repeatedly before a TA noticed and came over to help. It was like something out of a cartoon. I've taken CS/Programming courses at a few institutions and never seen quite that level of despair/frustration. Maybe its just a CAL thing, I didn't end up transferring to CAL in the end so CS61A was the only class I did on campus, so can't really say.

[gnulinux]

I personally had a blast and absolutely incredible time in both CS 61A and 61B. That they're "weeder" classes can be considered true only from the perspective that they're challenging classes but note that almost all CS/Math classes in Berkeley are highly challenging and these weren't outliers at all.

Before coming to college I had tons of programming experience and two interships. I wrote websites, backends, real life applications shipped to customers, school club websites, I even taught C++ in my high school's IEEE chapter. CS 61A completely changed my perspective on how to think about code, I found it so valuable that I could graduate just with 61A, study everything else (algorithms, data structures etc) myself and be fine with it (this is likely an exaggeration of course, there is some value to finishing a traditional CS curriculum).

[peterleiser]

This. I went into the CS program cold, no prior programming experience at all. After CS3 and CS61A/B/C my relationship with my brain changed entirely. My approach to deconstructing and then solving problems, of any kind, radically improved.