Intro

This is probably one of the most famous courses offered at Stanford, especially given its status as the introductory CS course. I found it really useful, but honestly this recap is really short since this is super run-of-the-mill generic intro CS stuff. There's little super interesting stuff.

Grade Breakdown

• 40% assignments
• 20% midterm
• 30% Final
• 5% Section Participation
• 5% Lecture attendance

Stats for Fall Quarter 2024:

• Midterm:
• Final: Median 105/140, SD 23.89, Mean 101.2/140

Meta-Level Stuff

This is another one of those classes where it's pretty easy to walk away with an A. A large portion of your marks are Psets and attendance, which you can usually get 100% on by just doing the work. Exams tended to be quite easy as well, with all problems being easily solvable. That being said I took it with Cynthia Bailey and Chris Gregg, and I've heard that under Keith Schwarz 106b can be more difficult.

Honestly, if you have some experience with CS, you'll probably find that you can skip every lecture and quickly fill out the gradescope quizzes for your participation grade. The Psets also walk you through the general problem solving approach, so they typically can be finished in under 2 hours. For the exams all you need to do is give an honest run through of the practice exams on pen and paper and you'll be fine.

Topics covered include lots of recursion, whether it's typical recursion or recursive backtracking, as well as lots of stuff about dynamic memory allocation and tracing pointers.

Huffman Encoding

This somehow managed to come up on multiple interviews for several separate tech companies, so I don't really want to forget what it's all about.

Ring Buffer queues

Similar story - this came up on multiple interviews for tech companies, so I don't really want to forget this one.

Dijkstra's

This was covered terribly in 106b - I remember lecture being a screenshot of the pseudocode for Dijkstra's, followed by the bold proclamation that lecture was finished "30 minutes early" and that everyone was free to go home.