Parallel programming

3rd Course of the Specialization Functional Programming In Scala: clearly down in quality compared to 2 first ones. () subject () good and challenging assignments (-) videos are too long (-) presentation not engaging (-) MOOC needs a refresh

This course disappointed me a bit after first two courses of programming in scala specialization: turns out good old for loop with mutable vars is much much faster than for expressions and that we threw check style out of the door and our code is much less pretty after all. Well, I guess that was a good lesson: there's functional programming, there are times when we can use it, and there are times when we need all the performance we can get out of our hardware. In terms of lectures and assignments they were average in my opinion, I would actually rate lectures higher than in the Read more This course disappointed me a bit after first two courses of programming in scala specialization: turns out good old for loop with mutable vars is much much faster than for expressions and that we threw check style out of the door and our code is much less pretty after all. Well, I guess that was a good lesson: there's functional programming, there are times when we can use it, and there are times when we need all the performance we can get out of our hardware. In terms of lectures and assignments they were average in my opinion, I would actually rate lectures higher than in the previous courses and assignments lower. I especially liked lego analogies to explain how different types combine together, material on parallel collections and combiners (though this last lecture was a bit hard to understand and assignment was lengthy and didn't re-enforce material enough, so by the time I finished the assignment I already forgot much of what was taught in lecture). Overall, my engagement was average but I appreciate an ability to use an autograder for the assignments without purchasing the course.

The first week gives an Okay introduction to the subject, even with half the lessons being about calculating limits of parallelism. I have nothing against those, but the intructors never use that again in the course. Instead, they just go trying differente numbers of threads to see which perform best. The second week has the worst lessons. It's about one hour to explain, very slowly, the concept of Associativity. Again, I have nothing against taking time to explain something carefully. However, all that good care and attention to detail is thrown in the garbage on the last week, that have little more than a half hour of lessons, and an assignment that is not well constructed, explained, and worst: has absolutely NOTHING to do with parallelism. Taking this course, the third one on the Scala Specialization, made me want my money back.

The course provides a deep dive into Parallel Programming with Scala, and is well worth the time invested.

great insights

Great course.

Super!

hard, weird but awesome

The topic is well explained in the videos and the assignments are challenging and fun. I really enjoyed how they (the assignments) are usually put in a context, e.g. they are part of some project and you can see some outcome.

Everything is good. I like course. But I had trouble with finding reason of some failed tests. It is very annoying when test fails, you lost some points but reason is unknown - if test failed for some particular reason it doesn't mean that that particular check or part of implementation is incorrect: reason can be in some other place not covered with test at all. Hope more tests will be provided, and for each fail will be possible find particular incorrect function or even check in some function. Full coverage by tests for each tasks can make course learning much more efficient.

I've got something new for myself. So I am happy :)

Pro: A very good course for those who are already experienced in ScalaCon: Only 4 weeks long :)