Fundamental Structures of Computer Science I

CS 201 is where you stop thinking about C++ as a language and start thinking about how the choice of data structure determines whether your program runs in seconds or hours, it's the first real exposure to algorithmic thinking, built around time and space trade-offs. You'll spend the semester implementing lists, stacks, and queues from scratch in C++ (wrestling with pointers and dynamic memory along the way), analyzing their complexity, and turning in four programming homeworks plus a written midterm and final. Everything downstream, CS 202, algorithms, systems courses, assumes you came out of here fluent in pointers, recursion, and Big-O reasoning, so this is the gate course that actually separates "can code" from "can engineer software."