Let's start with cons. Not often, but one have confusing exercise explanation(method docs contradict with assigment text), sometimes explanation is unclear in general. Too much geo math and in general course exercises look like "realize some formulae" definition. Grading tests output basically useless and it's sad. Tests must be the main point that explains proper way to right implementation and at some point being spec explanation.

But some pros for me exist. Geospatial is not one of my biggest-fav-domain, but it was interesting to dive into the new fields. The next thing is the oportunity to work with some kind of real world data processing scala application, it was quite interesting.

I give it four stars and a half. At the end my feelings tell me that I rather like this course than not. Yes, it has some certain rough edges, but this course help you to level up your scala and spark skills and to fill one's hand.

In the end I want to give some advices. If grader falls with out of memory, try to optimize extraction code. Spark is not always the right tool for all cases. Also, Spark has awesome web ui where you could watch what happens and where is main bottlenecks. Write your own tests... even simple test can help to find out bugs that you could think is not expected. That's all. Thanks for the good course.

week 2,3 very hard......

This capstone project is a nice end of Scala specialisation!

Nice course which cement your knowledge of scala in action!

Thank you. The course is really nice.

Very challenging. Great course/project/specialization

This entire Scala series has been excellent.

Most of the case, it is hard to deal with big data. This course provides an opportunity to handle big data and visualize the handled result on UI. Also, as you learned from FPD in Scala course, UI is developed with Scala.js

Thanks for designing the course.

The best

It's very well put together. It just requires a great deal of time dedication specially because blocks of time should be meaningul to not lose the context present in one's mind.

The capstone project has done a fantastic job of drilling in some of the important fundamentals taught in the rest of the courses. It is definitely worth taking if you've done the rest of the courses.

Nice hands on Course

Capstone project is challenging specially because of the performance standards. I enjoyed solving the problems

Interesting project and fun to work on.

As with many of the other courses, could benefit from providing a few tests. Even after writing property-based tests using ScalaCheck there were some grader results that I was unable to reproduce.

In the end, still worth the time and effort invested.

For a lot of sections one couldn't really use Spark, said sections were restricted to translating Spark datastructures to Scala collections and working with those.

Good Spark / Big Data project.

Provides a good example of real problem project focussed on Spark and big data analysis.

I really enjoyed this course - it goes from the very basics of Spark and tests your ability regarding Scala knowledge.

The capstone project is really well structured, but at times it felt like the instructors could give more information concerning some definitions around the project, i.e. how all of the case classes from the models file interconnect or relate to each other. By the end of the project it would be helpful explaining how the Layer class was actually structured as well.

In reality my opinion of this course is 4.5 out of 5 - I think the instructors made an admirable job trying to convey most of specialization concepts into the capstone, so congratulations :-). If not for some of the aspects above, I would rate it 5/5.

A bit sad that actual full working solution is not graded as it invovled generating files on disk, which is compuation intensive...

Interesting project, but exercises were too simple. I was able to complete with course in 5 evenings.

Good project enjoyed playing with the Scala.ja

The tasks are very interesting! Unfortunately, sometimes the causes for the failure of the tests are not clear.

Excellent capstone that lets you test your knowledge of Scala in a (semi)real project environment. Though i found that the main difficulty for me was in understanding the context of geographical computations. Making it difficult to find if not passing test was due to error in my code or in my understanding of geographical context.

Very cool to see the entire application fit together eventually. However, feel sometimes the explanation for the exercise could have used more details/examples.

I've read a lot of reviews before me and see that they mentioned several cons: off-topic programming assignment, imbalanced difficulty distribution and instable grader, vague feedback information.

For the few points mentioned above, I'd say I've experienced all of them indeed, it's true.

But for a project that's to be called "real", you're gonna have to adapt yourself to production environment and work like a true professional. That means you gotta tolerate faulty situations and ambiguous specifications. (Quite often, you don't know WTF they want, but you'll eventually come around and hand in a piece of code that runs smoothly with the right output.) It's something you deal with every day if you work in a tech firm as an SDE, RSDE, etc..

In terms of this kind of blank-filling programming assignments, it's just fine for me. Some argue that they should allow us to write everything from scratch and judge the grades by the output, allowing more flexibility for the developemt process. I think the skeleton code is simple enough, leaving enough freedom for you to mess around. If you allow me to start from scratch, I'm gonna finish it with C++ or Python.

The one thing I say they should really fix is the instability of the grader. Random failures and insufferable waitings are the two things that take away most of the fun. The programming assignment itself wasn't so hard, but was made unnecessarily much harder by these two factors.

For the sake of the previous four courses, I can spare 4 stars. But I understand those 1 stars.