SS
It was a really interesting course where the things were presented in a very simplified manner in which I could learn the topics in a short span of time.

This course teaches learners (industry professionals and students) the fundamental concepts of concurrent programming in the context of Java 8. Concurrent programming enables developers to efficiently and correctly mediate the use of shared resources in parallel programs. By the end of this course, you will learn how to use basic concurrency constructs in Java such as threads, locks, critical sections, atomic variables, isolation, actors, optimistic concurrency and concurrent collections, as well as their theoretical foundations (e.g., progress guarantees, deadlock, livelock, starvation, linearizability). Why take this course? • It is important for you to be aware of the theoretical foundations of concurrency to avoid common but subtle programming errors. • Java 8 has modernized many of the concurrency constructs since the early days of threads and locks. • During the course, you will have online access to the instructor and mentors to get individualized answers to your questions posted on the forums. • Each of the four modules in the course includes an assigned mini-project that will provide you with the necessary hands-on experience to use the concepts learned in the course on your own, after the course ends. The desired learning outcomes of this course are as follows: • Concurrency theory: progress guarantees, deadlock, livelock, starvation, linearizability • Use of threads and structured/unstructured locks in Java • Atomic variables and isolation • Optimistic concurrency and concurrent collections in Java (e.g., concurrent queues, concurrent hashmaps) • Actor model in Java Mastery of these concepts will enable you to immediately apply them in the context of concurrent Java programs, and will also help you master other concurrent programming system that you may encounter in the future (e.g., POSIX threads, .NET threads).

SS
It was a really interesting course where the things were presented in a very simplified manner in which I could learn the topics in a short span of time.
AM
Very well structured and presented course! Very useful material with good relevant examples! Thank you, Prof. Sarkar for this Concurrent Programming in Java course!
PS
Great course. With minimal effort you can learn about important concepts and see immediate results regarding the actual speedup you can achieve using concurrent programming.
GA
Very good explanation of the concepts of locks, and how important data-structures example HashMap are optimized to improve performance
SG
The course was niece. It could have made of use of a programming language from scrath rather than depending on the pre-built library.
PB
Amazing course. Especially for those who want to really understand the foundations behind multithreading and concurrency in Java. As always, Professor Sarkar is brilliant!
EE
A lot of my time has been wasted due to a very poor explanation of actors. All it takes is "Actors have their own threads and that is how they are concurrent.
JX
The course overall is good, but the autograder of assignment can be improved so that the students will not get frustrated to their answer for such long time
FC
Excellent way to refresh what I learned some years ago in Operator System. Also I won a small hands-on experience using locks, isolation and high level concurrency in Java.
SM
This was a good course and covered all the topics relevant to the course. I liked the Optimistic Concurrency in week 4 - that was an area I was not exposed to before
MM
The most challenging part was to pass the miniproject_4. I made some changes in the condition to get the passing score. Thank you!
HK
Teach clear and concise. Good to know more about java concurrency. It is interesting to hand on programming such as actors which linked as list.
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Examples and projects are somewhat "sandbox" grade, without touching real problems of this field. Code and tests quality is poor in my opinion.
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 frustration 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 have mixed feeling about specializations. This topic can be hard. And course mentions most of the important topics in non-sequential computer computing essential to making working systems. But it does not give deep insight in many of them.
Very basic
This is the worst online course I ever had. Especially the programming assignment. You just need to change one line or add one line, which makes this course like a video tutorial. Definitely not for an intermediate level learner.
Course was very good. I some how was not in favor of using the custom lib. i would have prefer we learning how to write that code.
Amazing course. Especially for those who want to really understand the foundations behind multithreading and concurrency in Java. As always, Professor Sarkar is brilliant!
This was a good course and covered all the topics relevant to the course. I liked the Optimistic Concurrency in week 4 - that was an area I was not exposed to before
Like previous course, The content is heavy in theory but not much in practical.
Same criticism applies that I already had for the Parallel course:
The presentation is annoying, due to the use of a pen on a glass board.
The worst part is the use of the PCDP library, which is to be imported statically (if you don't like Java's object focus, then why don't you choose another programming language instead? I'm anyway not convinced that Java has particularly good support for concurrency, compared with C# or C++, so that really doesn't make sense to me...). Professor Sarkar invents some abstract notation and suggests his own library to make you write code that, through the static import, looks just like your theoretical notation. Okay, but that's not what programming is about, that's like teaching machine learning by showing you how to use sklearn, rather than covering the underlying algorithms (except that the concepts presented in this course are much more trivial than machine learning algorithms... and the course doesn't even have depth, don't expect e.g. that it tells you what the difference between a Hoare and a Mesa monitor is!). Maybe it would make sense if you teach how the library implements these things, but the way this course is delivered it really amounts to a horrible presentation of some theoretical ideas with some toy exercises, and you can almost delete the "in Java" part.
The course is pretty good and lays down the basic theoretical knowledge about concurrency needed to begin developing expertise in this field. The quizzes and projects help you remember and understand the theoretical aspects while at the same time the projects also give you a glimpse of how the learned theory and aspects are applied in a more realistic coding setting rather than pseudo code.
Great course overall but the difficulty of the mini-projects is not evenly distributed. Some are extremely easy while others seems to be too hard. Also it would be better to be able to use some libraries other than the RICE PDCP library which does not seem to be used elsewhere. For someone with moderate Java experience, the course could be finished within a week.
Dr. Sarkar is a great teacher. The course includes different kinds of implementations of concurrent programming using Java. The Quizzes and the mini_projects were of great help when it comes to the reinforcement and they were selectively chosen for providing the implementation knowledge about the topic as well.
Really good and brief introduction to concurrent programming. Professor is superb at explaining the basic primitives of concurrent programming in a language agnostic way. Furthermore, I found programming assignments quite helpful as well in cementing the learned concepts.
"It takes a genius to make it simple.”
Prof. Sarkar has explained and illustrated some of the complex concurrency and parallelism concepts in very simple terms. Even an experienced concurrency java developer will have something to take away from these classes.
Thank you.
Great introduction to concurrent programming concepts. Well-paced. Instructor is clear and personable. The mini-projects feel a little too easy sometimes, but at that point it's up to me to dig deeper and learn more on the topics. I enjoyed this course very much.
Great course. With minimal effort you can learn about important concepts and see immediate results regarding the actual speedup you can achieve using concurrent programming.
Excellent way to refresh what I learned some years ago in Operator System. Also I won a small hands-on experience using locks, isolation and high level concurrency in Java.
Very well structured and presented course! Very useful material with good relevant examples! Thank you, Prof. Sarkar for this Concurrent Programming in Java course!
Awesome course, it nudges students in right directions, provides them with solid fundamentals and encourages them to deep dive more into topics. Thanks a lot!
Teach clear and concise. Good to know more about java concurrency. It is interesting to hand on programming such as actors which linked as list.
The course is well organized with very clear instructions. It helps me to understand several fundamental concepts about concurrent programming.