CS61A

CS61A, officially titled "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs," is a foundational computer science course offered at the University of California, Berkeley. It is widely recognized for its rigorous introduction to the principles of programming and computational thinking. The course typically uses the Scheme programming language, a dialect of Lisp, to explore fundamental concepts such as abstraction, recursion, data structures, and the nature of computation itself.

The curriculum emphasizes not just how to write code, but how to design and reason about programs. Students learn to build complex systems from simple components and to understand the underlying mechanisms that make software work. Key topics include functions as first-class citizens, higher-order functions, object-oriented programming principles, and an introduction to the hardware-software interface. CS61A is often the first computer science course taken by many students at Berkeley and serves as a prerequisite for more advanced computer science subjects. Its challenging nature and pedagogical approach have made it influential in computer science education beyond UC Berkeley.