love this topic!!!! New and frontier technology in NLP. More and more concentrations and analysis on this big data research.

I wish more courses about Parallel clustering using Spark available to the many.

I really enjoyed the course. It is very comprehensive and exhaustive. It covers a lot of details on Spark and all its APIs and looks under the hood. I recommend to anyone who really wants to learn Spark.

This course gives basics of distributed computing by practical examples, several alternative approaches to the same problem are considered, this gives more insight and flexibility. Very interesting one!

Excellent and broad view of Spark and its design foundations. Besides the formal knowledge of Spark, it could change my perspective about how Scala and Akka had a crucial role in the Spark architecture.

Excellent overview of Spark, including exercises that solidify what you learn during the lectures. The development environment setup tutorials were also very helpful, as I had not yet worked with sbt.

The sessions where clearly explained and focused. Some of the exercises contained slightly confusing hints and information, but I'm sure those mistakes will be ironed out in future iterations. Thanks!

goot as introduction about spark and big data.

Small notice: it is incorrect to compare performance hadoop and spark. As I understand, spark was expected to be compacred with MapReduce.

Excellent course! It's clear the instructor put a ton of thought and hard work into this. I learned a lot that I wouldn't have learned without taking this class. Thank you, Heather!

The course starts from the basic concepts and moves towards the complex concepts. The most important thing is that minute details are taken into consideration and explained properly.

I had previous experience with Scala and Spark and I really enjoyed the course.

I learned some very interesting things, specially y de last 2 weeks about partitioning and Spark SQL.

Good overview of the subject, covering all important aspects. Assignments were well prepared, with a couple of unclear points that were quickly discovered and explained on the forums.

Awesome course and awesome teacher! Nevertheless, to grasp the most of this course, you should do the previous 3 courses of the "Functional Programming in Scala" specialization.

Dear Heather,

your course on big data with scala is the very first online course I participate in.

I enjoy the way you explain the material and receive a real aesthetic pleasure.

It surely opens your mind, even on unrelated topics, I found myself able to apply some of the distributed computing logics even to imperative sequential programming. Good job.

Excellent material. Very good flow. Heather has an amazing way of walking through the flow and simplifying the concepts. Great assignments -- takes a bit longer than 3 hours.

Great course. Very informative. I have learned a lot. Lessons are very well prepared and structured. Implementation tasks are interesting. Thanks to all EPFL team. Great job!

Well explained with many details, both: theory and practice really well prepared. I highly recommend to take this course if you're interested in Spark and big data analysis.

Great course with nice explanations of some Spark concepts. The third week was particularly useful for my understanding of Spark shuffling and partitioning. Thanks a lot!

Great course about Big Data analysis

It was my first exposure to Big Data frameworks and I learned a lot about the problems trying to be solved and the power of Spark.

I like this course because It isn't about analysis (as Yandex course here), it's about real work with Apache Spark for analysis. One of the best courses on Coursera!

the theory is very clear and well explained.

the practical assignments are a little bit ambiguous but they are overall very good and challenging.

highly recommended!

Nice introduction into Spark with details about how Spark works internally. This course also talks about when to use RDD/Dataframe/Dataset and performance pitfalls.

really good material, well explained with many examples.

maybe more information or precisions should be added to the assignments but good material and explanations

It was really useful material. It would be really nice if there are more assignments to polish the materials we learn, but I am really satisfied with the course.

Great course to get going with Apache Spark. Would recommend to someone who has java or scala experience already and wants to learn about distributed processing.