I enrolled to my first online class 2 month ago on coursera to learn scala and functional programming. The class was given by none other than Martin Odersky, one of the creator of scala, and I have to admit that I am impressed by the quality of the course. I just finished the last assignment and I'll upload all of them on github after the hard deadline for the last one.
Some thoughts about this course:
- Great material with interesting assignments (huffman code and space solution search for blockorz). Although the problems were sometimes tricky they were nicely split up in small parts.
- Functional programming is fun. Now I'm doing a lot of javascript and I can use some new way of programming now (maps, filters and folds are super cool)
- It is possible to write programs which are readable and concise only with immutable data structures. I'm not quite sure how to use that in big projects yet but I'll try to make more use of immutable structures in the future
- Streams and lazy initializations are great! (and these concepts were totally new to me)