Instructor:
Prof. Jonathan Shewchuk
Office: 625 Soda Hall
Phone: 642-3936
Email: jrs@cory.eecs

Teaching Assistants:
Ariel Kleiner, cs61b-ta@cory.eecs
Siu On Chan, siuon@cs
Courtney Wang, courtney_wang@berkeley.edu
Kevin Weekly, kweekly@eecs

Course Secretary:
Alice Lemieux
Office: 387 Soda Hall
Phone: 642-1042
Email: eecs-inst-support@eecs

Lectures are Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm in 155 Dwinelle Hall. The class web page is at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/61b.

Introduction

Please read this document carefully. It contains answers to most of the questions that students ask during the first few weeks of class. The subjects include: how to contact the staff, prerequisites, textbooks, labs, grading, late penalties, and policies on academic misconduct.

Please check the class web page at the beginning of the semester and regularly throughout. A list of discussion sections, labs, and the TAs who run them is linked from the web page. A tentative syllabus, which includes lecture topics, exam dates, and homework due dates, is also available there. Several online handouts are available. Finally, your reading assignments are listed there. Please keep up with them. There will not be reminders in class.

If you have a general question about something not covered herein, the best option is to post a message in the ucb.class.cs61b newsgroup. The newsgroup is required reading, whether you post questions to it or not. The TAs and I will post announcements, clarifications, hints, and other information there. If you don't read it, you may be the last to find out about review sessions and major changes to assignments and due dates.

You can access newsgroups from Netscape and some other web browsers. From Unix, you can access newsgroups from a news reader like pine. To access the newsgroup from off campus, you can go through the web portal http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/webnews using your class account. We (the instructor and TAs) check the newsgroup regularly, and other students will be able to help you too. Other students will also be able to benefit from the answers.

If you don't want to make your question public, or if your question would expose part of the answer to a homework assignment, you may send email to cs61b@cory.eecs. Your email will be forwarded to the instructor and all the TAs. You are always welcome to come to our office hours, posted on our doors and linked from the web page. If the office hours are not convenient, you may make an appointment with any of us by email. There are about 60 of you to every one of us, so please reserve email for the questions you can't get answered in office hours, in discussion sections, or through the class newsgroup.

Prerequisites

If you have not taken either CS 61A or E 7, chances are you will not be admitted to the course. If you have taken a course you feel is very similar to CS 61A (not just a programming introduction, but one that covers the topics above), fill out an appeal form in the main CS office, 387 Soda Hall. I do not handle appeals, so please do not attempt to lobby me for admission to the course.

We will be using the Java programming language in this course. Knowledge of Java (or related languages like C++) is not required for this course.

If you have already taken a data structures course in any programming language (e.g., C), you may not need to take CS 61B. If you know Java too, you might be able to skip CS 61B entirely, and if you don't, you might only need to take CS 9G (self-paced Java). If you feel that this course may be repeating prior experience, please see Brian Harvey in 781 Soda.

If you are not familiar with the Unix operating system and basic tools, either because you did not take CS 61A, or you got through CS 61A without understanding Unix, it is important that you learn. Some student groups, including CSUA, teach help sessions on Unix.

Textbooks

• Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates, Head First Java, Second Edition, O'Reilly, 2005. ISBN # 0-596-00920-8.
• Michael T. Goodrich and Roberto Tamassia, Data Structures and Algorithms in Java, Fifth Edition, John Wiley & Sons, 2010. ISBN # 0-470-38326-7.

Sierra and Bates give an introduction to programming in Java. We will be using the Sierra book from the beginning, so purchase it soon. Their book is not meant to be a complete reference to all of the concepts in Java. If you are an experienced C hacker, I also recommend David Flanagan, Java in a Nutshell. The chapter entitled How Java Differs from C can bring a C programmer up to speed in Java remarkably quickly. (That's how I learned Java.)

You should also buy the class reader, available at Copy Central at 2483 Hearst. The bulk of the reader is old CS 61B exams, which will not be provided online (though the solutions are). By far the best way to study for the exams is to try the old ones. The remainder of the reader is information on using the compiler, debugger, and editor.

Electronic copies of all class handouts will also appear on the web page. There may be up to four types of files. Raw ASCII text (readme files and other filenames without an extension) should be printed using the enscript command. PostScript files (filenames ending in .ps) can be viewed using Ghostview (gv), and can be printed using the lpr command. PDF files (filenames ending in .pdf) can be viewed and printed using acroread (Acrobat Reader). Do not use enscript on a .ps or .pdf file! You'll just print reams of garbage. HTML files (filenames ending in .html) can be viewed and printed from Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, or Microsoft Explorer.

Laboratory and Discussion Sections

Because of limited space in the labs, you are only allowed to attend the lab in which you are officially enrolled through TeleBears. If you are not enrolled in any lab (e.g. you're on a waiting list or you're a concurrent enrollment student), attend a lab that has room to accommodate you. (You might have to try several labs to find one whose TA has room for you, so don't wait until the last lab of the week.) For discussion sections, we are not strict, although you are encouraged to attend the section for which you are registered. Your Lab TA will be your “primary” TA—he or she will check off your lab assignments, return your midterms, and help with grading corrections. However, you should feel free to attend any of the staff office hours (not just your own TA's) and ask any of us for help.

Laboratory sections are mandatory. Each week you will solve an assignment in the lab, and have points checked off by your TA. Discussions sections are not mandatory, but many ideas will be discussed in section that don't come up in lecture, and a few of these ideas will appear in the exams and homeworks. Discussion sections are also your best opportunity to ask questions and learn interactively. Midterms will be returned in section.

Account forms will be given out in lab during the first lab, so it is important that you attend. If you miss your first lab, see a TA as soon as possible. It is important that you login to your account and change your password as soon as possible; we use the information about who has logged in to determine who will receive grades in the class.

The Soda labs are open from 7:00 am to 6:30 pm Monday through Friday. Outside these hours (and on weekends and holidays), the doors to the building and labs are locked. You will need to obtain Soda Hall keycard access at the CS main office (387 Soda).

Enrollment

If you are on the waiting list for the course, the reason is that you are waiting to be admitted to a lab/discussion section that is currently full. Sooner or later, you need to choose a section that is not full if you want to take the class. Until then, find and attend a lab whose TA thinks there is enough room to accommodate you.

If you are something other than a regular Berkeley undergraduate, you either need me to approve your concurrent enrollment application online—in which case you should send me an email to let me know it's pending—or you need my signature on a form admitting you to the course—in which case you should bring the form to me or slip it under my office door, and I'll sign it for you. Either way, find and attend a lab that has room to accommodate you.

Course Work and Grading

In addition to exams, there are three types of assignments: homeworks, labs, and projects. Homeworks (roughly one per week) are short programs. Homeworks must be done individually. They are due before lecture on Fridays, and will be graded by one of the class readers. Homeworks are worth a total of 20 points out of the 200, and each homework is equally weighted. Your worst homework grade will be dropped. For example, if there are 11 homeworks during the semester, each of the 10 best is worth 2 points of your final grade.

Labs are short programming assignments that must be done during your scheduled lab period. Labs are done in teams of two. Grading of labs is done by having certain steps checked off by your TA or a lab assistant. Labs are worth 10 points of your final grade, and each lab is equally weighted. Since I expect some of you to have conflicts during the semester, we will drop your lowest two lab grades.

The remaining 70 points of your final grade will come from the programming projects. There will be three of these during the semester. The first and last projects will be worth 20 points; the second will be worth 30 points. You will do the first project individually, and the second and third projects in teams of two or three students each.

The projects are a great deal of work, and cannot be put off until the last moment. If you start working on a project a few days before its due date, you will not be finished by the deadline. Not even close.

Your final letter grade will be determined by the following chart.

There is no curve. Your grade will depend only on how you do, and not on how well everyone else does. CS 61B is not a competition.

Our experience is that grades on homeworks and projects are higher than on exams, so you should assume this will be the case for your own grades and not be surprised if your exam grades are lower than your final grade, while your homeworks and projects are higher.

All assignments will be turned in electronically. Your grades will be recorded online and can be viewed using the glookup program.

If you believe we have misgraded a midterm exam question, return it to me (or your lab TA) with a written note on a separate piece of paper explaining the problem. Staple this paper to the front of the exam. (Not the back! I mean it!) The entire exam may be regraded, so be sure to check the solutions to confirm that your final grade will go up after regrading. All requests for regrades must be made within two weeks after you receive the graded exam. By University policy, final exams may not be regraded.

A course grade of Incomplete will be granted 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.

Lateness

We do allow the projects to be turned in late, but there is a penalty. If your project is N hours late, we'll reduce your earned score by ⌈N/2⌉ percent. While this gives you some leeway for putting the final touches on a project, don't stretch the deadlines too far. A project that is one day late will lose 12% of your earned score. After five days, even a perfect solution won't earn a passing grade.

Exams

Policy on Collaboration and Cheating

We encourage you to help each other learn the material by discussing the work before you do each assignment. Explaining the meaning of a question or offering advice on what a compiler error message means are interactions that we encourage. On the other hand, you should never have another student's solution or code in your possession, either electronically or on paper. (We will call this the No Code Rule.) If you are not sure whether a particular interaction is appropriate, talk to your TA or the instructor.

If you receive a significant idea from someone in the class, explicitly acknowledge that person in your solution. Not only is this a good scholarly conduct, it also protects you from accusations of theft of your colleagues' ideas.

Presenting another person's work as your own constitutes cheating, whether that person is a friend, an unknown student in this or another class, or an anonymous programmer on the web who happens to have solved the problem you've been asked to solve. Everything you turn in must be your own doing, and it is your responsibility to make it clear to the graders that it really is your own work. The following activities are specifically forbidden in all graded course work:

• Possession (or theft) of another student's solution or partial solution in any form (electronic, handwritten, or printed).
• Giving a solution or partial solution to another student, even with the explicit understanding that it will not be copied.
• Working together (with someone other than your partner for the assignment) to develop a single solution and then turning in copies (or modified versions) of that solution under multiple names.
• Using Java's built-in data structure libraries, including lists, vectors, or trees, unless an assignment explicitly specifies that you may. A central goal of CS 61B is to make sure you understand how data structures work internally. Therefore, I expect you to use only data structures whose implementations you created yourself or learned in class. In future CS classes, you will frequently use data structure libraries whose implementations you are not familiar with; but in CS 61B, we are learning the internal mechanics of data structures.

Cheating will be policed by advanced cheating-detection software. If you share code with another team, you will be caught, even if you take steps to hide your cheating.

In my experience, nobody begins the semester with the intention of cheating. Students who cheat do so because they fall behind gradually and then panic. Some students get into this situation because they are afraid of an unpleasant conversation with a professor if they admit to not understanding something. I would much rather deal with your misunderstanding early than deal with its consequences later. Even if you are convinced that you are the only person in the class that doesn't understand the material, and that it is entirely your fault for having fallen behind, please overcome your feeling of guilt and ask for help as soon as you need it. Remember that the other students in the class are working under similar constraints—they are taking multiple classes and are often holding down outside employment.