I would consider it as a overview of possible approaches, not a course. Assigments could be frustating because outcome is sometimes non-deterministic (I wasted few hours of my time because of this, it turned out that my solution was fine). Sometimes given examples are not following Java documentation in details. They could not work in corner cases. It should not be the case in the course made by professionals.

Compared to the other courses I took authors of this one did not put much effort in preparing good materials and exercises. Course can by challenging by means of standing the frustration the assigments could give you. And in my opinion not because it is hard to pass them and they are demanding. It is because they are not properly prepared.

I know that this topic can be hard. This specialization touches many important topics which are essential to making working systems.

I have mixed feeling about specializations. It mentions most of the important topics in non-sequential computer computing. But it does not give deep insight in many of them.

Frustrating at times but overall good.

Really great videos and instruction. The class covers a broad swath of topics, which is great but fails to get really in depth in any one topic, as a learner you will need to dive deeper into topics that grab your interest. The projects are a little easy but are well organized and self contained. Considering the difficulty in creating projects for distributed computing environments I think the instructors did a good job.

The course was awesome. I learnt a lot about distribution programming and it will better my performance personally and in the job industry. Thank you.

Excellent course! Vivek is an excellent instructor as well. I appreciate having taken the opportunity to learn from him.

It forced me to recall OpenMP and MPI. Thought it's already dead in favor to IMDG, spark, upc and so on.

Practical tasks - miniprojects - was too easy to implement. Need more complex tasks.

Programming assignment can be made a bit tough.

Thanks to the courses of the specialization, I could understand in a correct way concepts like nodes, distributed programming, locks, correct use of threads and that always will be in certain form limited by the amount of existing cores in the nodes. Now I can continue on my more confident path and see cloud computing topics thanks to the excellent theoretical and practical base given in the 3 courses.

A thousand thanks to Professor Vivek Sarkar and the entire team at Coursera and Rice University

All the good stuff application to clusters and cloud computing:

MapReduce, Hadoop, Spark, Sockets, Remote method invocation, Serializing/Deserializing, Point-to-point communication, Socket multicast/broadcast, SPMD model with MPI, Thread vs Process, Distributed Actor, Distributed reactive programming.

Lessons are short and easy to understand and the mini projects are complex enough to get a better grasp of the theory.

Great surface level coverage of basic theories and Java frameworks for Distributed Programming. Projects are very simple and quizzes can feel a bit too specific to the lectures, but those two things just make it easier than it is in the real world. I took a similar class back in college but this was a nice refresher on thinking about first principles and modern new libraries.

Great explanations. Great foundations. I think the most important thing in this course is how the teacher always focuses on what is going on behind the scene so you can apply the same concepts again and again in an technology agnostic manner.

It's great to see a solid course about Parallel, Concurrency, and Distributed Programming from a Professor with real practical knowledge into it. This should solid my knowledge and prepare for day-to-day work, and interview. Thanks a lot.

It was a pleasure taking Vivek sir's class. It will really be helpful for my ongoing research projects and definitely in the future for upcoming endeavors. Thank you to Rice University and Coursera for the wonderful learning opportunity.

This course, like all specializations, is quite useful, I learned a lot about distributed and parallel computing, for those who are not familiar with parallel computing, it will be very useful.

Very well structured and presented course! Very useful material with good relevant examples! Thank you, Prof. Sarkar for this Distributed Programming in Java course!

I really liked the course. Great videos and lecture summaries! Maybe the assignments could be more sophisticated.

Great experience and all the lectures are really interesting and the concepts are precise and perfect.

The hints and tutorial for mini projects in this section can be reduced a little bit.

This course is a great beginning to the distributed programming world in java!

the course is great but I really need more practice to remember new material