This course is indeed introductive to learn all the necessary stuffs about Spark. It is pretty good to tell much about shuffling. Because we should not only be familiar with how to operate on Spark, but we should really have a good understanding of what's going on underneath the hood. Thanks!

The information was explained really well for someone coming in with no spark and minimal scala knowledge. Due to this course I understood basic spark concepts well enough to begin understanding pipelines built on top of spark such as ADAM.

I would highly recommend this course to everyone.

Favorite so far out of the Scala Specialization Course. It was executed really well, and taught really well, too. Kinda wish they would add more exercises to help us get more experience with some of the concepts, but that's something you can always just do by yourself either way.

Excelente curso. Já trabalhei com Spark, mas tive a oportunidade de aprender muitas coisas novas sobre ele. Achei muito interessante a abordagem sobre as novas estruturas de dados que chegaram nas novas versões (para mim, pelo menos, pois trabalhei com a versão 1.6). Recomendo.

Great course overall. The feedback on failed tests and out of memory errors on the assignments can be improved to make it more user-friendly.

Would be great to see a more advanced version of this course that dives deeper into the machine learning features of Spark, etc.

Really enjoyed this course. Unlike previous courses where I had to wrestle with algorithms and only learn the subject as a side effect, the assignments in this course directly addressed the subject. One of the best in this series except for the first course in scala.

Brilliant lecturer and slides! The only problem is assignments not being clear on the expected outputs. Sometimes it takes more time to figure out what exactly is asked than to find the solution. A few more test cases or detailed examples would help.

I loved this course - it was a great introduction to Spark. At the end, I wasn't (and am still not) clear on type-safe operations on Datasets, and now to write Tests to verify this.

These will be one of the targets of my upcoming research and study.

This course is a nice guided way to get started with Apache Spark! I wish I took this course earlier when i was using Spark at my previous company. It would've come in handy. Plenty of great content and the course exercises supply good practice.

Lovely presentation of Apache Spark fundamentals using Scala. I believe that this course gives you enough background to do just about anything you want (as long as you have some familiar with Scala and SQL, and are willing to dig deeper).

Thank the teacher, the course is very good, the teacher is also very nice. The first three weeks of feeling learned a lot of new knowledge, the last week may be each class time is relatively long. It would be better if you could split it.

Teacher has excellent teaching skills. She takes enough time to go through to concepts. Before introducing a new technique she teaches why the new technique is needed and explains how it solves existing problems. Absolutely great course.

Very Very Interesting and helpful!

The slides' layout is very clear and step by step for each important topic.

The motivation of why we need dataframe and dataset and what's their difference is explained with a logical and reasonable way!

Awesome teacher - very engaging. This is probably first time when I am watching lectures with pleasure. Also you can easily feel that course is fresh and specially made for this unlike previous ones from Scala speciality.

A walk through from the oldest RDD to newest Dataset API of spark, together with brief introduction on how spark work. Home work set up several scenario to use the different kinds of spark API to do basic data analysis.

Great introduction course to Spark with excellent materials and hand-on programming assignments. Thanks for taking effort to get this class online. I have enjoyed it very much.

Kudos to Professor Miller, we love you :-)

Great Material and lecture videos. It covered important concepts we need to know about Spark and helped me to learn further. Assignments were on real datasets and helped me to explore different APIs if Spark and Scala.

I really enjoyed the course, specially the first 3 weeks. Week 4 videos could be split in more videos, it felt as if they were not reviewed as much as the other weeks videos. Anyway, the whole course is really good.

Enjoyed the course and learnt lots. Stimulating material. Though I feel that the week 4 material could be made more concise. On the whole would recommend to other interested and it will definitely help in my career.

Demystified the subject for me. I felt like the lecturer covered a considerable amount of material in relatively short time. The assignments helped to cement the knowledge acquired over the duration of the course.

love this topic!!!! New and frontier technology in NLP. More and more concentrations and analysis on this big data research.

I wish more courses about Parallel clustering using Spark available to the many.

This course gives basics of distributed computing by practical examples, several alternative approaches to the same problem are considered, this gives more insight and flexibility. Very interesting one!

Excellent and broad view of Spark and its design foundations. Besides the formal knowledge of Spark, it could change my perspective about how Scala and Akka had a crucial role in the Spark architecture.

Excellent overview of Spark, including exercises that solidify what you learn during the lectures. The development environment setup tutorials were also very helpful, as I had not yet worked with sbt.

The sessions where clearly explained and focused. Some of the exercises contained slightly confusing hints and information, but I'm sure those mistakes will be ironed out in future iterations. Thanks!