I took the course last year, and really enjoyed it a lot. It's a very good introduction to functional programming.<p>For anyone unsure about taking the course, I wrote about my experience on my blog [1], maybe that will be of use. I posted more technical details of the course contents on google+ (links in the blog post).<p>[1] <a href="http://www.avparker.com/2012/11/25/functional-programming-principles-in-scala/" rel="nofollow">http://www.avparker.com/2012/11/25/functional-programming-pr...</a> .
Can't recommend this course enough. Martin Odersky is a great lecturer and very passionate about functional programming. Learning Scala was a useful bonus too.
To anyone doing the course or interested in Scala, 2 recommendations:<p>* the blog of Daniel Westheide (<a href="http://danielwestheide.com/" rel="nofollow">http://danielwestheide.com/</a>) has a series of posts (starting at <a href="http://danielwestheide.com/blog/2012/11/21/the-neophytes-guide-to-scala-part-1-extractors.html" rel="nofollow">http://danielwestheide.com/blog/2012/11/21/the-neophytes-gui...</a> and currently at lesson 15) which may be worth reading to complement/expand on the course lectures. Probably not useful for the course itself until you’ve finished week 2 or 3, but relevant anyway.<p>* the book “Scala for the impatient”, probably the best book out there about Scala from beginner to advanced level
Anyone who's done some Haskell care to comment on whether scala is worth learning?<p>I read the scala book a few years ago, then I decided to go to the source first and learn Haskell. However, I don't see many Haskell employment opportunities available in my area or industry (London, Hedge funds/algorithmic trading). I have however seen an up tick in FP jobs in general, mainly scala or F#.<p>So, those in the know: What should I learn if I want to land a decent FP job? Scala, F#, something else? Or should I continue to wait for Haskell's inevitable word domination?
For those of us waiting for the continuation course, Odersky seems to be planning one for the fall. <a href="https://twitter.com/odersky/status/315048673069379585" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/odersky/status/315048673069379585</a>
I took this course the first time through and really really enjoyed it. This time I got a bunch of my Coworkers to sign up by promising them I could TA the course for them. It should be a good time had by all. Especially since we can then deep dive into parts of it to show how it applies to real world problems.
I would like to add one thing to this discussion: Martin Odersky's class (I took it last year) is also very useful if you use other functional languages rather than Scala. I have been using Clojure for about 2/3 of my development in the last year and I found this course to be useful. The lectures are also fun to watch.
Wish it had a Google sign-in button. Don't get me wrong, I <i>hate</i> it when sites <i>force</i> you into signing with one of these sign-on services (or worse - Facebook-only sign-in, like Spotify was for a while), but I also appreciate being able to use that quickly when I don't care that much about the site, and I wouldn't waste my time creating a "full account" to see what's about.
For those who have taken it already, what's the time commitment like? I would hate to sign up to find myself swamped with more hours than I can feasibly handle on top of an already full schedule.
I cannot recommend this course enough. The lectures and assignments are <i>very</i> well organized. It was worth every minute, and I look forward to a "level 2" FP course from this instructor.
Started this course late a few months ago. Very enjoyable, unfortunately I missed the "passing" grade by two tenths of a point :)<p>Check it out, they have a very nice setup for grading homework and the videos are very informative.
I have been trying to play with Scala for the past year, and I have made some strides, but I keep falling back to language with which I am comfortable to just get things done. This is largely in part to my lack of familiarity with Scala, but I have really wanted to tackle a large project with it. I have read the book that Martin Odersky wrote, but this will be an awesome addition that will, hopefully, push me over that final hurdle to becoming productive. Thank you for posting this! I signed up today.
Functional programming is <i>the</i> most important CS topic if you want to become a great (1.5+) engineer. No, you aren't going to be doing pure functional programming very often. In the real world, eliminating mutable state is neither possible nor desirable. It's extremely worthwhile to learn how to <i>manage</i> state, though. Hell, even the Unix philosophy (do one thing, do it well) was directly inspired by functional programming, though it <i>couldn't</i> be purely functional (infeasible at the time, plus semantic mutability).<p>TL;DR: If you don't know what "flatMap that shit" means, then it's worthwhile to learn it.