Learner Reviews & Feedback for Cloud Computing Concepts, Part 1 by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Loved the content.

Very good course !

very good course!!

Worth every minute

fantastic course!

Excellent course.

it's very great

Great course

Good course!

mi favorita

Great!!!

Loved it

The best

so cool

Good

good

V

Very interesting courses and topics. The course has nothing to envy to normal university courses and it is indeed a university course (from the online CS degree from U of I). I am really glad that this material is available to the public. Few points on which the course can be improved:

* On the slides there are different notations and formats that are used. Making all of them uniform would help better in the understanding of the contents.

* When providing topics and algorithm, please also provide also actual examples and explanation of what kind of problems we are trying to solve. For example it is not clear what problem we are trying to solve with the Multicast Problem, since some time ordering algorithm seems more appropriate.

* The code in the programming assignment is terrible. It needs a serious review. It is supposed to be C++ code, but in reality it uses many of the C-style programming paradigm that are very outdated. Also all the creation/handling of raw pointers are completely wrong, many times a simple reference could be used. Encoding messages have never been more complicated, like JSON or BER encoding never existed. You should thrive for improving the code quality so that students can have a good example of a very well written code.

It's hard to love this course. It deserves 3 stars, but as truly unique which gives you some in-depth understanding of how does cloud computing works underhood, I'm giving it 4 stars.

Pros:

-> Unique content about cloud computing internals

-> Really hard programming assignment. It includes local grader, so you're not that blind in how you work is graded on coursera side. It's a good way to use this grader to mark you progress.

-> Broad coverage of topics

Cons:

-> The programming assignment. It's not that hard as an exercise itself to learn gossip protocol, but the cumbersome C++ code written in C style can get you nuts. There are only one assignment about one particular topic, presumably to be done across all 5 weeks step by step. I did it at second week and once completed, i was pushed myself to complete the course after, I would prefer to have small medium difficulty exercises on each week subject.

-> Explanations and proofs. Some topics are poorly covered, most of the time you'll hear only sketch or overview of proof without going into details. Many times lector just say something like "you can figure this out by yourself". Only pseduo code will be shown (except Hadoop examples copy-pasted from official docs)

Overall I really enjoyed this course, and I think I learned a lot, so thank you!

However I think there were some things that could be improved.

Firstly the quality of the code provided for the programming assignment was very low. It contains a lot of things that are far from modern c++ best-practices (e.g. using raw arrays instead of std::vector, mixing malloc and new, using new where there is no reason to use it, using raw pointers when references would be fine, missing consts, macros, ...). There were also some relatively minor bugs: the first log message doesn't print with the correct prefix, and the grading script as provided doesn't run (IIRC it was because the #! isn't on the first line). Since this course could be some people's first introduction to C++ I feel that it's important to set a good example, and to keep the code simple and safe.

Secondly the symbols used for things were often inconsistent between slides, which was occasionally confusing but should be easy to fix.

Despite these issues I still think this is a great course, it just could be a little bit better.

While I understand that C++ had EmulNet, which must have been pretty handy when designing the assignment, it's really far from ideal to learn this sort of thing with such a low abstraction level language. I would have very much preferred to spend my time learning the algorithms more deeply, but I actually spent most of it remembering pointer arithmetic and memory management.

What I'm saying is C++ is fine, but it would have been better if we could use a language on which we can actually focus on the logic (which is not simple to start with), not data representation, memory management and what not.

Other than that, I loved the lectures. The examples are a bit outdated, but the concepts are solid, which is what really matters. Thank you very much!

The content of this course is great and the video lectures are of good quality. If you are looking for a university quality distributed systems course this is the best course i've found. Where this course lacks is in the outdated and tedious programming project and some quiz's that have questions not covered in lecture. The programming project will have you using c-style c++ code so be prepared. It has inconsistent use of data structures and types in its template code that you cannot modify and you will spent a significant amount of time doing memcpy to encode and decode data for char buffers. The quiz's have questions not covered in lecture like Chandy-Lamport questions around process state recordings. BEWARE THIS IS NOT A COURSE FOR BEGINNERS

The coverage is good and there is a clear linkage of the concepts included in the beginning with the rest of the contents as they flow in - not just throughout this course, but also for the entire specialization. It would really help if the instructor would speak a little slowly (a bunch of words get garbled) and if the slides have lesser content (have more slides and redesign). That way, the instructor might not feel forced to talk so much per slide and the listening might be a little easy on the ear.

However, that does not take anything away from how that content is organized - that is good and takes you the flow rather well.

I generally like the course because it expanded my horizon and taught me new concepts which are important in my work. However I think the presentation can be improved. I also miss a more in-depth comparison between the various related concepts. The programming assignment is not designed in the most test-friendly way. It contains some snippets that are half-baked and unclear instructions to provide the missing code. It required some reverse engineering to understand the template code. This can be seen by some as a fair requirement but I expected a more structured and unambiguous approach.

1. Need more tutors to answer the question

Some of the questions in the quiz are badly written and some of us did not understand and tried to ask. And almost no one responds the questions in the "discussion forum" when you reach the end of the course.

2. C++ project assignment

The project claims to use C++, but mixed the C and C++ and doesn't follow C++ best practices. It is very bad for people who have to learn C++ to finish this project since they will get confused by plenty of C code in C++.