Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (a different course)
The CS 61 series is an introduction to computer science, with particular emphasis on software and on machines from a programmer's point of view. This first course concentrates mostly on the idea of abstraction, allowing the programmer to think in terms appropriate to the problem rather than in low-level operations dictated by the computer hardware. The next course, CS 61B, will deal with the more advanced engineering aspects of software on constructing and analyzing large programs and on techniques for handling computationally expensive programs. Finally, CS 61C concentrates on machines and how they carry out the programs you write.
In CS 61A, we are interested in teaching you about programming, not about any particular programming language. We consider a series of techniques for controlling program complexity, such as functional programming, data abstraction, object-oriented programming, and query systems. To get past generalities you must have programming practice in some particular language, and in this course we use Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. This language is particularly well-suited to the organizing ideas we want to teach. Our hope, however, is that once you have learned the essence of programming, you will find that picking up a new programming language is but a few days' work.