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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Most of assignments are good. They show applications of parallel programming very well. Some lectures are booring? but important. For instance, lectures about assotiativity.

The content presented definitely is good, but in the assignment the things used could be explained in the lectures for better understanding of learners.

Good course and good level on the assignments but needs a lot of improvement on the lectures, specially in the two last weeks.

Хочется получить опыт работы с примитивами scala для параллельного программирования, а не с готовыми болванками

Lectures are not easy to understand. It almost feels like they plucked various sections from a longer course.

No presentaba los topicos que deseaba. Ya no deseo el cruso, y no se muestra como darme de baja.

There are not clear test errors, that points to another place in code where mistake is placed.

Deep lectures, but exercises where more about complex problems than about parallel programing

Too much imperative technics in this "functional" parallel programming course.

The course if good, but i believe the content should be more didactic.

Good but too theoretical and not very didactic.

For now, the worst course in Specialization.

Not enough Scala. Akka version was better :(

should contain more details

exercise are too heavy

I must admit I am very disappointed with this course.

First of all - provided unit tests are inadequate. To say the least. They do not cover all functionalities that are to be implemented. Of course I could write my own unit tests. If I only knew what I was supposed to do... Yep, a few times my own tests passed but tested functionality was turned down by coursera tests with a perfect message like "assertion failed". Great, I know this. But I want to know what exactly failed without having to guess and reuploading solution dozens of times. I wasn't able to max out the last assignment (I did 9/10) due to another obscure assertion message - "body not found in right sector" and have no idea what was wrong and which body were not in which sector. Message that something went wrong without any details is like no message at all. Implemented functionality is rather straightforward so I suspect something went wrong in previously implemented methods which were accepted by coursera. Moreover I was able to pass one method implementation just by simply filling the whole matrix with one specific value which proves rather poor quality of the tests.

Second thing - this is very academic course. Very. I doubt anyone will find it useful in real life unless you are a student or maybe a teacher.

Generally I feel like I wasted my time here. Sorry.

UPDATE: I am a completionist so I finally managed to max the last assignement out with some guessing and of course like I expected I had a bug in some old method (poor coursera tests had accepted it) but I am still dissapointed and can't imagine why I would need this whole stuff in the real life. What I learnt here is guessing and "hacking" coursera tests.

The course presents two core approaches to parallel programming - task and data parallelism. While these concepts are really useful, I expected more details on, for example, how to implement the _parallel_ construct used throughout the lectures. The materials were good and I can use some of the ideas straight after the lectures in my everyday coding, but the assignments were really slightly related to the topic.

Barnes Hut simulation assignment. I'd say it has nothing in common with parallel programming in Scala. It looks like the authors looked for some real-life example or use case for Combiners and this simulation model looked nice. But, really, does any developer not working in university would ever use it? It's completely impractical, the most of the time I spent reading the description of simulation model, but the coding itself was just playing with 2D coordinates and some basic recursion. I'd expect something more practical, e.g. implementing simplified form of Hadoop map-reduce or something like that so I can use it after the course. But Barnes-Hut is too specific and is pretty far from everyday problems developers encounter.

For a while, that's the worst course of scala specialization. All the parallelism is just obvious division of a one big piece on several small pieses, and perfrom parrallel tasks on it. It's enogh to write merge sort with several threads to get the main idea, which is proposed here. You don't need to watch 4 weeks of coursera video and perform tasks to get it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I expected something more than trivial division. Besides that, I don't like the tasks. And I hate the last one week. Very bad description of the problem, it made me really suffer. I'd like much more the first 2 courses. Which I rated as 5 and 4 accordingly, but this one is fail. Besides that, I like the theory about parallel and concurent programming, and all the stuff about "iron". Hope the 4th one course will be better.

I really don't liked how you are forced to implement a logic you can barely understand by looking at the minimal assignment text. I mean, what the heck. I thought this course (or courses) were supposed to teach you specific subjects like parallel programming. Not how you compute the centerX based on four quads in a fork? I mean. come one. At least explain enough so that it's at least remotely possible to implement the core logic in the start of week 4. I mean, how should I know that the size of a fork is <spoiler>? (yup, can't tell if even if you pointed a gun at me)

Excellent lectures, let down by the difficulty of the assignments.

While the tutors clearly know their stuff, I found the assignments really quite challenging and of limited educational value due to the mixture of new concepts introduced by the lectures along with new (to me) mathematics or CS that also needed to be grasped.

I'm an experienced professional programmer with the EPFL 'FP in Scala' and FRP courses under my belt, so I thought I knew what to expect but this was much more time consuming than I'd thought.