A great excuse to learn Scala. A serviceable introduction to functional programming. Middle of the road in quality relative to other computing coursrs on Coursera I've taken. Work load toward the lighter end for a Coursera course focused on programming [among those I've taken]. Use of IDE encouraged. Use of SBT required.
Of note: assignment structure and IDE encourage and facilitate testing practices. Also for a later iteration of a programming course the discussion forum is very active.
Since I can't learn anything from lectures unless I force myself to pay attention by taking detailed notes, I took detailed notes. You can find them at the link below, although I make no guarantees about their correctness. (Note that they may also spoil the answers to some of the impromptu in-lecture quizzes.)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uk54kbCIKUx8eX2vJsX591ss...
The course didn't teach me Scala. I suppose if I was an FP beginner, I would have learned something, but not much. It had about the same depth in FP as my college Programming Languages course, except that course also covered a ton of other topics.
Part of how dissatisfied I was is because I took the course immediately after Dan Boneh's cryptography course, in which I learned a ton. I was very disappointed how little content was actually in the course.
If you took the course and read the forums, you probably noticed a LOT of people really struggled with the FP part. Imagine if it also added more in-depth Scala features...
Actually I thought grossman's was better at giving a comparison of FP and OO and hit on some more of the theory in FP (for example, odersky doesn't talk about the expression problem, but grossman did).
There will still be a lot in scala that's confusing after taking this class, but it's trying to teach the concepts rather than the language details.
That being said, I really enjoyed it and would recommend it.
Scala is an interesting blend of FP and OO. Just be aware that the ML-style languages (or even a lisp e.g. Racket) really feel more like FP. The blend is what makes it a mind-expanding course.
I review the course in more depth at http://bigscary.com/2013/02/27/functional-programming-in-sca...
I've been a developer for 10+ years but have been ignorant to FP. It just opened my eyes a little bit.