This course takes you through not only concepts particular to scala, but staying true to its title, through general principles of functional programming.

The course is also sprinkled with useful and interesting information and presents ideas (BNF, algorithms for LCF, square root, queens problem etc) that generally expand your understanding and knowledge. The problem sets are challenging. They make you actively apply your mind and provide a sound learning opportunity.

Very well structured and presented course. Highly recommended.

The course is challenging. There are tricks that I needed to figure out to get past the assignments. But, the tricks forced me to think about functional programming. I started by trying to use accumulators whenever possible, since it feels like looping. The last assignment was a mind bender for me, but once the aha moment hit with respect for for comprehensions, it was only a few lines of code to knock off the solution. I have an idea for a different, perhaps more efficient solution. So maybe, I am not quite done yet :-)

I wanted to get more familiar with functional programming paradigms for a long time and I know that Scala is a mighty programming language. This course is a perfect introduction to both items. To me it took quite longer time to finish it, couple of restarts even. I really like that now I can shift my terms as needed and I didn't really noticed that there are terms - it helped me to concentrate on stealing couple of hours now and than when suitable instead of forcing myself to finish some unnecessary deadline.

I think this course can lead any programmer into a larger and beautiful way for functional programming paradigm. I think this course was quite difficult for me due to lack of experience with FP. Also, I have no professional experience with FP and besides my Java 8 certification, it does not fulfill all the requirements for doing this course in a smoother way. I think it should be done in 7 weeks (not 6) because of the time required to watch all videos and get some time to absorb it all and do some practice.

As other reviews have pointed out, this course is insanely difficult. It's very challenging, which makes completion all the more satisfying. Finally completed it after 3 weeks! What kept me going though the course was the promise of the capstone project, which is about using parallel computing to plot global temperature data. Imagine what you would be able to do with the power of parallel computing that is only made possible by the (as others have pointed out) mind-bending functional programming!

This course is really awesome. I tried many tutorials, documents videos etc. But in the end I was not happy. I felt an incompleteness. But this course was really great. It helped me to understand the functional programming and how to use it.To move from a OOP paradigm to Functional it was really difficult for me initially. But by this course now I am able to do it and think about a solution in functional programming way. So I am really thankful to the team who made this course. Thanks a lot.

Fantastic course! Functional programming really warps your brain in the beginning, and that's a great thing for any software engineer. Martin Odersky is a fine teacher who has prepared very concise and expressive lectures and examples... Proof of this is seen in how few questions people seem to ask on the Discussion Forums. I'm strongly considering enrolling in the rest of the "Functional Programming in Scala Specialization" because of how awesome this course was. Highly recommended 10/10!

The content was well presented and the exercises were engaging. I generally haven't found paid courses to be any more useful than open source guides and documentation. But this course is an exception. I especially enjoyed how the course focused on Computer Science / mathematical theory and evaluation, opposed to just "how to get things done in functional languages". This is a great introduction to functional concepts. I'm looking forward to when I'll have time to enroll in the next units.

I would not recommend this course for a beginning programmer, as the concepts Oderski covers are fairly complex and the homework is not simple. However, if you are wanting to learn more about functional programming, love to understand the guts of how programming languages work and process data, and want to diver deeper into recursion, then I would definitely recommend this course. I found it very informative and helpful. I will probably take the course again. And Scala is awesome.

This is a great course to learn both Scala and functional programming. I have a few recommendations:

Have a student review the setup instructions twice a year to keep up with changing bugs and software. Add more time to cover some of the details, for instance, how to cast a Nil when using fold. Plan on this taking more that 4-6 hours a week. This is especially true if you are not familiar with functional programming, the JVM environment or mapping/folding functions.

I loved this course. It reintroduced me to the core concepts behind functional programming, which i first learned in university, with a great mix of lectures and fun exercises. FP is a good tool to learn to think abstractly about problem solving. The teaching is really high quality, like you'd typically only find in a top world university. Would recommend to anyone curious about beautiful computer science concepts and wanting to make better use of their free time.

For someone without experience in Java, but with other programming experience (C/Python), I found this course to be interesting and challenging. There's a lot of recursion in the assignments, which made my head spin. .. but I thought the course coverage was quite good. I supplemented with the instructor's book.

the main recommendation I'd have is more information about using the IDEs. A lot of my frustrations ended up being about particulars of those.

Amazing course. New concepts are built on previously presented content, making everything easier to understand. Besides teaching the programming language, the instructor also presents some of the language inner workings in optional lessons, allowing one to go as deep as they want. Assignments are well designed, but challenging, specially for newcomers to the functional paradigm, however they show how FP can be used in practice, making them rewarding.

The course is logical and thorough, flawlessly delivered (well, except maybe the audio quality at times), and challenging just enough to make a seasoned imperative programmer scream in frustration, but not quit. 😀 The only thing standing between this course and perfection are the pop quiz bugs. But even they contribute to the message of the course in a way: if Coursera's platform were written in Scala, there probably would be fewer of them. 🕷

Very good course! I noticed some of the instructions are out of date (e.g. there are examples of where to go on the website, but the website format has changed). I wish I understood more of what sbt and the IDE were doing behind the scenes. It seems like there is a lot of structure built into making the assignments function properly and I would like to better understand how to make my own project with similar level of complexity / capabilities.

Great introduction to different way of thinking through examples in quite powerful language (for programmers who used to imperative way of thinking) . This course is useful not only for people who program is Scala, but also for Java (8+) developers to get familiar with streams, lambdas, higher-order functions, and maybe some concepts, as I observed, not-so-often used by many programmers: like variance in parametric polymorphism with generics.

I love learning about Scala and the rudiments of functional programming from the author of the Scala language. It's been a real pleasure to approach learning this from the ground up, and to get all kinds of little tips and subtleties along the way. Martin Odersky does an excellent job of building piece by piece and with many language-agnostic theories, and presenting classic challenges which have haunted coders for generations. Thank you!

This course is a little bit difficult to get started with if you do not have any code experience. However, it is a really great course because the content is sufficient but not too much and the course is clear enough. The last two assignments are tough for me and they took me a long time to figure out, also I read a number of materials about Scala functions on Internet. This is the first course that I finished and I really like this course.

Easily one of the best courses I've ever encountered. It is difficult for someone who is not familiar with FP but in a good way. You learn a great deal as you work on exercises, which are, by the way, very thoroughly prepared.

I must say, however, that setting up a different IDE than the suggested Eclipse was a pain and course does not cover the environment or its troubleshooting. Discussion forums thrive with such discussions, though.

The best course for learning Scala and Functional Programming!

Taught by the creator himself, this course is for everyone who wants to learn Scala and understand prinicples of FP which makes up Scala's elegance. The course is curated such that there is no requirement of prior expertise of other programming paradigms and data structures, however, knowledge of any OO-language would surely help you relate/compare and learn faster.

Excellent course taught by the creator of Scala. This is by far the best way to dive into the world of functional programming and along the way learn a cool JVM based programming language. The main focus of this course and as a whole specialization is learning to think functional not learning Scala so I'd recommend reading Programming in Scala by Martin Odersky as the companion book to learn more about Scala language itself.

Very challenging but excellent course. Equivalent to difficult university BSc CS material.

I found it very helpful to supplement this course with a more "practical" treatment of the material at the same time. Odersky's academic explanations of Scala and FP are excellent, but can be difficult to comprehend at first.

A practical supplement to the material really drove home how high quality Martin's explanations actually are.

A great start. Challenging while informative. The last assignment in the last week really made me think about my approach from a functional programming perspective rather than a procedural approach. It also really made me focus on how to ensure that the types of responses going into a list are of the most compatible narrowest type needed for the task i'm performing. I'm excited to sink my teeth into the next class.

Extremely good introduction to functional programming.

I like the fact that theory was included but the lecturer was careful to point out the boundaries of the course.

Consider having an alternative version of the course which has more theory of functional programming. I understand though that there might not be demand for this and that this sort of material cannot be successfully examined by any submitted exercises.