Is Architectural design a good course?

Is a good choice do this course? Introduction to Systematic Program Design - Part 1 from Coursera

• I am still not working as programmer, then I would like to know if this course is a good choice to prepare myself. Introduction to Systematic Program Design - Part 1 https://www.coursera.org/course/programdesign Thank you very much in advance

• Answer:

  NOTE: This answer involves some spoilers about the course. I have completed the Systematic Program Design course, and while I have mixed feelings about it, I found it useful overall. The course revolves around the use of design recipes to help you design your programs, and the big idea is that you design your program based on how you design data. Data is central to everything. How you design functions and everything else flows from how you represent data. With the right data representations, everything just flows smoothly. Some other things that are emphasized in the course are: - A "test-driven" way of development. Almost every function you write will have its own tests. And you write the tests before the function. This helps you think about the behaviour of the funciton before you start implementing it. - Writing function signatures. If you've used Haskell before, they look almost exactly like those in Haskell. Suppose you are going to write a function that adds 2 integers and it returns an integer. The function signature will look something like:     Integer -> Integer -> Integer - Documenting functions you have written Now, if you have some programming experience, you might find the course quite  easy. The instructor's advice is, take this course as if you are approaching computer programming as a total beginner. The pace of the course is rather slow initially and it involves quite a bit of tedium on things you might find really simple if you are an experienced programmer. Add on to the fact that the recipes don't seem to be that useful until maybe a few weeks into the course. But don't give up. A really good point about the course is, it's probably one of those few courses where the instructor himself replies frequently on the discussion forums. And the teaching stuff do take the students' feedback into account, which is why you see the same course mounted now, but at a slower pace. That said, I don't really find myself using the design recipes taught. Maybe I am a lazy person and can't be bothered to program so systematically. Will I recommend you take the course? Yes, but only if you have the time.