Martin Odersky
Last year, the Scala team and I developed a massive open online course for Principles of Functional Programming in Scala on the Coursera platform. We were blown away by the success of that course. So far, it got over 100’000 registrations, with one of the highest completion rates of any open online course.
Today, I am thrilled to announce together with the third iteration of Principles of Functional Programming two new offerings.
Reactive Programming
First, there will be a successor to the course. It’s called Principles of Reactive Programming. I am super-excited to co-teach the course together with Erik Meijer, of Rx fame, and with Roland Kuhn, the tech lead of the Akka actors framework. Reactive programming will assume a good grounding in functional programming and will add topics such different forms of monads, combining functions and state, composing with futures and observables, and designing resilient actor systems.
Time wise, the two courses follow each other. Principles of Functional Programming starts September 16 and goes for 7 weeks, then Principles of Reactive Programming starts November 4 and also goes for 7 weeks. So if you want learn about reactive programming but feel your Scala skills could use some improvement, there’s still time to enroll for the functional programming course.
Personalized Tutorials
In a second new development, Typesafe will offer supervised tutorial classes that follow both classes and run concurrently with them. One of the challenges of massive online courses is that students get only automated feedback on their homework assignments. Using Typesafe’s online tutorial platform, students can enroll in small groups with an expert tutor who will give detailed feedback on programming techniques in their homework assignments and elsewhere.