Great course

Nice course!

Cool course

best course

Brilliant!!

Cool course

Very good!

Excellent

Awesome!

Thanks!

Super!

It is a good introduction to parallel programming with Scala as the language and some relevant scenarios in which the paradigm is useful. It would be nice to have some of the lecture materials updated to Scala 2.13 as there have been changes to Scala's parallel collection/package in the past couple years. I still benefited from having to troubleshoot and fix problems as I followed along with code samples from the lectures. The assignments are challenging but manageable. I actually find myself wanting less code pre-populated once I got comfortable with the syntax and material. I appreciate there are optional challenges for those who want to learn more, e.g. code optimizations, proofs of associativity and commutativity,

Excellent course. Gives deep enough understanding of parallel programming. Used knowledge immediately to optimize my huge in-mem data structure to reach 50 ms (instead of 300 ms) response time. I'd suggest the following to improve: 1. I'd make "pass" score no less then 90 or even 95%. With 80 only it is possible to PASS having key mistake (e.g. on week4 I haven't created a new combiner, using old one, in combine() operation, and I still got 80 - PASSED) 2. tests in grader are hard to reproduce on local machine: it is not that obvious what's wrong, where to focus.

Most of the concepts and explanations were good but the assignments could be better organized. I wasn't sure what I was doing for a while, and the test cases don't cover the code in a way that progresses naturally. Some parts of it can't be tested until most of the code is written, and then major portions of the code isn't even tested until it's submitted. It would be great if the tests progressed along with the code and people didn't have to guess at the correct solution but just knew it was right when they got it.

The course is pretty hard, even for someone like me, who has been working in parallel computing for years. The reason is the structure of the course and the presentation of the material. The topics are somewhat chaotic and in many cases it is hard to tell whether a certain operator comes from the Scala standard library or is just an abstraction.

All in all, finishing the course is a rewarding experience. But beware, there is a significant gap between the foundation courses taught by Martin Odersky and this one.

Good course with a lot of interesting ideas and explanations. The reason I gave it a 4 and not a 5 is that I think it would have been better without involving instructors' own library on top of Scala instead of teaching Scala-level constructs directly. While I appreciate the notion of teaching general parallel programming ideas, introducing one's own constructs to promote it seems unnecessary - at the very least, these constructs' implementation should have been thoroughly explained in the course.

This is a good course that has some really interesting assignments. The lectures are understandable and the topics are explained a bit nicer than a lot of theory in the other Scala courses from Martin Odersky, who conveys knowledge in a more "textbook" form. I am, however, taking one star out for the last assignment which was rather muddy in terms of explanation, long and not easy to debug due to it's size and parallel aspects. I felt way more positive about all other assignments on this course.

Really cool course. I'm enjoying scala as a language as it has many simple methods to achieve complex goals, including parallelization, however this course also presents parallelism in a rawer fashion explaining in depth some of the techniques to parallelize seemingly sequential-only tasks.

Last week's exercise is quite long, and albeit being a truly beautiful project, most of the implementation is not strictly related to parallel programming.

In any case a totally good course!

The course was well covered and very informative. As someone with zero experience in parallelism, I felt I could've absorbed a lot more if the topics were not completely new to me.

As mentioned in other reviews, the last assignment, Barnes Hut Simulation, was very time consuming and I found myself spending more time trying to understand the problem rather than implementing it. That was very challenging for someone with low academic background.

The course was ok, but at times too much theoretical when it comes to proofs of some methods are working as expected. I think its good to know the principles of parallelizing application and changing the potential algorithms, but this has applicability only in specific fields like comlex computations that need to be highly parallelized and less likely you would use these principles in standard backend development

There was some really nice material covered in this course. For me, this was the best one so far in the series. The instructors presented clear and understandable lectures. The week #4 programming task was a bit harder for me, but only because I kept forgetting to think simple and reflect on what had been covered in the course. Once I stepped away and came back everything fell into place.

Great explanations and insights around parallel programming. The instructors help you understand how parallel programming works and are doing great in making the complex topic understandable. To improve it further, there could be more explanations on performance differences between alternative solutions as well as some guidance on how to apply these ideas in practical Scala programming.

Awesome course to learn parallel programming and advantage of scala to achieve this.

Learned how to think algorithms in parallel being careful that it's not always better to do everything in parallel.

The only thing I didn't like that much is that the course has too many mathematical explanations and maybe that lectures should be optional for those that want to go further.

This course had a lot of depth to it, both in the lectures and the programming assignments. The last assignment seemed needlessly complex with not enough focus on the parallel programming aspect. I wish there had been more of a focus on how to actually write the parallel and task constructs which were instead given already implemented without much explanation.

Too difficult, especially the last week, especially for person without strong math background. I felt that material from the two last weeks is important and necessary to grasp PP, but speed should be slower.

I think the best way to improve this course would be splitting 3 and 4 weeks to obtain 6 weeks course like the first one in the specialization.