Taught By: Gordon V Cormack

ISA’s: Benjamin Wong, Rivers Chen

Term: 1A (FALL 2020)

This was probably my favorite course this semester. I really enjoyed the content, which built up from the very simple data structure of BST’s all the way to how computers work. Honestly, I looked at what students in CS135 were doing, and I would much rather do the work that I did in this course, as it was much more fulfilling and interesting. I think I greatly enjoyed this course because of how applicable concepts in it were. As someone who sucks at competitive programming, some efficiency techniques and strategies we learned were really interesting and helped me in coding beyond what I had to do for the course, in turn better preparing me for coding interviews. I also think that this course spring boarded my interest in CS, as concepts taught such the lambda-calculus, streams, and lazy computation were all concepts which I now have a genuine interest in, which I would also like to learn more about.

Prof Cormack and the two ISA’s were another major reason why this course was so enjoyable. Prof Cormack was very interesting to listen to and was able to explain everything relatively clearly, and was very approachable for help. The ISA’s held a lot of help sessions and created plenty of resources to aid us in the course, such as course notes and review videos.

I would suggest taking this course if you’re in CS, even if you do not have any coding experience, as even that is not a prerequisite. Find out more about how to apply to this course here. I guess I’ll see you guys back here for my review of CS146!