Here comes the summary of the Coursera course Fucntional Programming Principles in Scala It's a little bit late, it has been two months since I finished the course. This is the first Coursera course I followed from the very beginning to the end and accomplished all the programming assignments with full scores, which helped me to get the certificate with distinction.

First the excellent parts of the course:

• Martin Odersky is a pretty good teacher, and all the lectures are well designed. I enjoyed watching the lectures a lot and most of which I have read more than once.
• The programming assignments are well structured, with detailed instructions and step by step guide. In each of the assignments, the whole task is split into several steps with approprivate level of abstractions.
• There are also many useful supporting materials like scala style guide, sbt tutorial, instructions on tools setup for the course, which made it easier to concentrate on the course content. For me, I don't have scala develop environment setup before the course, and by following the tools setup section in only took me less than half an hour to get everything ready for trying the example code and the assignments.

As for the less-good things, I would say:

• Both the lectures and the assignments are quite easy for an experienced programmers (No functional programming background needed), I was expecting more challenging stuff.
• There are no official solutions distributed. (The course will be offered again some time later) However, I still think for those students who passed the course should be qualified to get the solutions so that they can compare those with their own to see where they can still improve.
• It's a pity that this is only the first half of an advanced undergraduate course that Martin taught on campus. I am interested in the other half.

After taking this cousre, I got a deeper understanding of the functional programming basics and it made me feel more comfortable while picking up SICP again (after 3 years). Now, I am convinced that I am able to go through SICP and finish most of the exercises. Also, I had a firmer grasp of Scala even though I didn't write more than 100 lines of Scala before; I understand more about the scala syntax, idioms and even the motivations behind some of the language structures. E.g., call by name/value, lazy evaluation, currying, pattern matching and so on. I will publish my detailed notes on the lectures and assignments to this blog later.

To conclude, I really enjoyed taking the course and many thanks to Martin , the TAs, and also the coursera staff for offering such a wonderful course.