I found the concepts taught in this course interesting, but the lectures were far too fast paced (it takes twice the time to get through them if you actually want to get notes down as you will need to pause continuously). I also thought that the programming assignment was far, far too advanced seeing many people who take this course may not be familiar with C++ or programming in general. Even with my background being computer engineering, I found it challenging and spent much more time on it than the time suggested by the syllabus. Lastly, the homework was a major step up from lectures seeing there were minimal examples given in the lectures. Overall, the assessment was so ordinary that I would probably recommend not paying for this course. I kind of wish I could still get my money back.

If you want to do this course properly, double the time it tells you it will take for each part of it. You'll need to. If you're working full time and just looking for a hobby course, don't do this one. Or do it across two sessions, instead of trying to get it done in the 5 weeks. Don't do it if you want to learn how to use cloud computing - only if you want to research in cloud computing or need to know how it works under the hood.

This course would benefit from a slower pace and more detailed examples. I feel that everything was rushed and minimal guidance was given, which made the course not particularly enjoyable for me. Without some background in computer science, I think this would be a real struggle to get through at all.

Sorry for the lengthy review, I hope it helps someone decide whether this course is really for them.

The educational material do not meet the expected quality, as of many other courses. The instructor speaks too fast, with a lot of technical jargon in between each sentence, but does not interact with the user by annotating the slides. So, I had to keep moving my eyes around (reading compact text, or complex graphs) to try to make a connection between his words, and which part of slides he is speaking about.

Furthermore, I have excellent Python and Fortran and CUDA background, but not C++, so, I cannot do the final exam. I am gonna drop out of this course.

The programming assignment is very old style C code/C++ not using any of the updated/newer syntax. It required spending more time relearning old coding conventions than actually implementing the algorithms and such. Was very frustrating. The material and course overall is great, save that assignment, which is required to pass.

Felt like the assignments were too good for what was covered. We have to Google outside the course material to understand many concepts. But loved the fact that we got chance to try some hands on. That clarified a lot about Gossip style protocol. But the contents in the course about Chandy-Lamport algorithm needs SURE restructuring. It is NOT AT ALL adequate to answer the assignments. I request professor, Coursera to have a second look at these topics.

My experience with this course was mostly positive. The lectures were helpful and fairly brief compared to a standard university class. The instructor provides good examples and the presentation slides are a good study guide. FWIW, the workload for this course is much less than a graduate level CS course (at least in my experience).

The negatives about this class: The homework/quiz assignments often asked you to solve a scenario more complicated than anything discussed in lecture, and there's no book to go read to get a better understanding. This made for an unnecessarily frustrating quiz process. Other reviewers have already criticized the programming assignment, and I concur with most of the complaints. You end up wasting too much time working on things other than learning content related to the course.

Not very engaging. Information overflow and poorly delivered lectures where the instructor is just reading from slides. I don't recommend paying for this, it is better to just check out the syllabus and read about this stuff online.

Note to instructor: Very simple concepts were explained using overly complicated language. Also, please refrain from over using the word 'essentially'.

The instructor's lecture sounded too robotic and I feel like he didn't make any effort to explain some of the principles or simplify the course to the audience. It feels like he just copied concepts and pasted them into the lecture and then read them quick.

Having to do the coding assignment in c++ is kind of bad :/

This course not good for me.

This is a great course with a good balance of just theory and concepts, with practical ideas and exercises. The programming exercise can be a bit annoying, but was enjoyable nonetheless.

very happy with the course. got to know new concepts. assignments are awesome. enjoyed working on them. enjoyed the course. it would be good if we get a color and original certificate.

The course introduces many cloud computing concepts, and briefly highlights the trending technologies. It is a good starting point for the beginners, it also contains a set of challenging quizzes and final exam, one could not pass unless s/he masters the course contents. finally there is the programming assignment which would not sound easy until you pass it.

The course provided a good overview on various topics at sufficient depth. The assignments and quizzes were challenging enough allowing one to understand the concepts in good detail.

Seems a bit difficult in the beginning, especially if there is a long break from academics but a thorough and in depth course

The topics and lectures are pretty good. Some of homework in my opinion is too time consuming, especially week4-5.

An acceptable course to those who want to have an insight to cloud computing.

High quality lectures are brought down by a terrible programming assignment and unresponsiveness by staff regarding the assignment.

The professor has very good step-by-step explanations of the algorithms as well as detailed notes. Although it may seem abstract or unrelated, the content is very relevant to the state of cloud computing.

...now to the assignment... The assignment has unclear instructions, a bad C++ (not 11) code template that can even prevent you from running the code due to hard-coded buffer sizes and not actually using sizeof() properly, and a lot of the ugly code is in regions you are not allowed to modify. Expect to spend more time ( > 3x as much) trying to figure out the template than actually trying to apply the concepts of the course.

The instructor seems to be in a hurry to get over the course and the course should rather be called a theoretical introduction to concepts in distributed computing. The slides are confusing with no animation. The programming assignment statement is just vague. Wouldn't recommend folks to pay and attend this. This may at best be for audit.

Too bad the final exercise is in C++, and not even in the modern C++ with smart pointers and other improvements. Makes you spend more time on the language issues than on the cloud computing algorithms.

I think the lecturer should not just "reading" the PPT. And the subtitle should not contain those words representing lecturer's sound ( e.g. uh).

The lessons are a bit boring, an interactive blackboard or animated examples could help.

Nice overview of all the cloud concepts but lags in difficulty level for beginners

这人说话总是爱绕弯，也可能是我英语太差，听他这些停顿，无数多的从句感觉很头疼。

Thought it was a waste of my time- made it halfway and quit, Primarily because what is covered in the lectures doesnt give you enough answers to pass the homework quiz - you can ace the knowledge checks in the lecture and fail the homework miserably.

Also, the instructor to be a bit unfocused - he only read the slides. The homework it was maddening. Much of what was in the homework was never covered in the course. For example in Homework 3 there are 4 or 5 questions about Ternary trees in Gnutella which is NEVER mentioned in the lectures.

I thought this might be a useful course but it turned out to be highly theoretical focused on the details about things like detailed approaches to Peer to Peer (which might be useful in context but seemed to be better served in a Cloud Computing Theory class.

I thought the class was quite good. Dr. Gupta is very knowledgeable about the subject and presents the material well.

This is listed as a beginner level class. I think it is worth noting that this could only be considered as beginner for people that already have a decent background in computer science. People not familiar with algorithm will likely sind themselves somewhat challenged.

One suggestion:

The quizzes are quite difficult, which is fine, however the only feedback you get is pass/fail. To give the student a better understanding of the material, it may be helpful to have a one or two question quiz after each lecture. These should be of the complexity that is expected on the exam (as compared to the in-lecture questions which are quite easy). For these mini-quizzes, solutions with explanations could be provided.

Lastly, the programming project is in C/C++. Many people seem to be complaining about why this isn't in a different language. Perhaps more of an explanation for the language choice is in order. (e.g. it wouldn't really make sense to implement distributed processing algorithms in Java due to the speed requirement.) C/C++ is listed as a prerequisite, so if you don't have this in your background, you should be prepared to spend some time learning at least the minimum, particularly use of pointers and pointer arithmetic.