AL
Apr 23, 2018
The course is fairly advanced and you would need to review the materials many times to understand the concept. The assignments are definitely fun and not as straightforward as other courses.
RC
Aug 24, 2017
Superb study material. Learnt a lot during this course. I am not much into mathematical stuff, but got a hang of how to break problems and improve efficiency through parallelism.
By Pedro R
•Mar 15, 2017
Great course!
By c86jeff
•Jan 22, 2017
learned a lot
By dh l
•Dec 7, 2016
Thanks!
By Taewoo K
•Apr 26, 2020
Good !
By Adam S
•Jun 21, 2016
Good learning materials, however the assignments are designed for compute science students rather than professional software developers as the most important part of the assignments is not parallel code, but it is algorithms. Yes, there is parallel code in the code of the assignments, but it is mostly written and your task is to implement the algorithm using this existing parallel code, while in my opinion it should be the other way around - you should implement parallel code and algorithms code should be already provided for you.
By Aleh V
•Mar 3, 2017
Wrongly assumes that it'll be easier for students to jump from the conventional 'parallel' java paradigms and constructs to parallel streams.
Not a good job on explaining why. It'll require from students some efforts to create the right picture in their minds.
Exercises are great and partially make up for the above mentioned shortcomings.
Some example code is very bad and goes against all the 'good' things being taught by Martin in the first course of the specialization.
By Valerio M
•Nov 27, 2016
Interesting course, but far too short. It ends up giving a quick introduction to some of the aspects of parallel programming. I enjoyed the assignments, apart from last one where the difficulty was more about the context of the example than any parallel programming aspects. That example, extended, could be a good capstone project, but I think it was not appropriate as a course assignment. I prefer courses that follow a book, and this course didn't.
By 家伟 陈
•Dec 21, 2017
Not friendly with beginners in Scala. You will be presented with tons of Scala code with minimal detailing on algorithms. Obviously the lecture expects you to be quite familiar with Java and Scala. And the lecture is not very informative either (at least for green hands in Scala). I found that the best way that works for me is to pause at each slide, study the code, and then go on to see what the lecture has to say.
By Sangam K
•Sep 30, 2017
I didn't like the last assignment. I didn't think there was much to learn there. I would've liked to implement more splitters and combiners. I did like the first 3 assignments very much. The lectures were pretty good, but I found myself loving some, and hating the others. I would've preferred more practical applications over theory. I think the lectures are un-necessarily math heavy.
By Hadrien H
•Dec 20, 2016
Content is good, less well polished than Odersky's courses though. Painful exercises with a lot of time spent on understanding the instructions instead of focusing on learning parallelism methods (especially the final assignment). Overall happy to have learnt from this, but clarity of assignments should be improved.
By Andy D
•Jan 14, 2017
In my view, this course was nowhere near as good as the earlier courses by Prof Odersky. The materials and pacing seemed all over the place - in some cases excessive time was spent going through quite trivial concepts, while elsewhere the course seemed quite rushed when looking at much more complicated ideas.
By Ostap O
•Jul 25, 2021
The course does a good job introducing the concepts for parallel programming, however fails to introduce the libraries and programming concepts the assignments use to bring parallel algorithms to life. Would be great to have week 2 or 3 go over the tools to bridge this gap.
By Shad A
•Apr 1, 2017
This course could have been better in my opinion, if we could have exercise that would deal with the concepts in more detail. I felt myself involved deeply in understanding the problem statement, rather than practicing the concepts explained in the course.
By Federico L
•Aug 5, 2017
Good content. Very basic overview of parallel programming algorithms and data structures in scala. Course feel a little bit hacked together although not as bad as the Functional Program Design one.
Course should be more in depth.
By masaaki f
•Mar 31, 2017
Online video is OK. But assignments are not much related to parallel programming specific issues. One case, this is my opinion but it's nice if students learn how scala solves "The dining philosophers" issue.
By Pavel O
•Oct 2, 2016
Good course. But I have a strong feeling that would be nice to have more focus on the practice. Some lecture not really much with the results of assignments. Good course anyway. Pavel
By Rudolf Z
•Sep 20, 2017
Most of assignments are good. They show applications of parallel programming very well. Some lectures are booring? but important. For instance, lectures about assotiativity.
By Shriraj B
•Mar 24, 2020
The content presented definitely is good, but in the assignment the things used could be explained in the lectures for better understanding of learners.
By Justin B
•Jul 3, 2024
It's not clear why the complexity level for the programming assignment's concepts needed to be so high, but they were good applications of the ideas.
By Luis V
•Nov 9, 2017
Good course and good level on the assignments but needs a lot of improvement on the lectures, specially in the two last weeks.
By Sergey
•Sep 30, 2020
Хочется получить опыт работы с примитивами scala для параллельного программирования, а не с готовыми болванками
By Joseph L
•Jul 31, 2017
Lectures are not easy to understand. It almost feels like they plucked various sections from a longer course.
By Carlos V
•Jun 19, 2020
No presentaba los topicos que deseaba. Ya no deseo el cruso, y no se muestra como darme de baja.
By Igor M
•Oct 24, 2017
There are not clear test errors, that points to another place in code where mistake is placed.
By Gabriel G
•Oct 30, 2016
Deep lectures, but exercises where more about complex problems than about parallel programing