Update2016-08-20: The Principles of Reactive Programming course seems to have been discontinued. There are a few new Scala course available which looks more promising to me.
After having taken the first Scala course, Functional Programming Principles in Scala, I attempted the second Scala course, Principles of Reactive Programming, from Martin Odersky and his associates when it was first given a couple of years ago. I gave up around halfway through the course since the workload was too much at that time.
Now I am in the middle of my second attempt at Principles of Recative Programming and have some thoughts about the course:
- It is quite academic.
Nothing wrong with this, but it is not the world I live and work in. - If you attempt this course, you may want to disregard some of the explanations on how things are implemented.
At least they did not made me any wiser, but your mileage may vary – see below. - To me, the workload is significantly higher than the 5-7 hours per week stated.
This is probably due to my lack of experience of functional programming in general and Scala and its standard library in particular. - The assigments are rather difficult.
Not only the actual programming, but also understanding what I am expected to accomplish.
I would recommend this course to someone who has a few years of experience of, and is actively working with, functional programming in Scala, Haskell or some other language and has an interest in understanding how the parts in the Scala standard library that compose the building blocks of reactive programming are implemented.