Learning Rust

Rust is my favorite language. From the compiler to Traits, cargo to docs that live alongside your code, it's got a lot to offer. It's also very portable. There are compilers for Windows, Linux, Mac, Web Assembly, and ARM chips. So from the web to microcontrollers to everything in-between, you can create applications for it using Rust. But the thing I love the most about Rust is it assumes I'm a bad programmer. Which I am. If I try to access a variable across threads that is not of a thread-safe type, it tells me. If I make a function call that could error out, it makes sure I handle that error(with a convenient ? for rapid prototyping). Mainly where other languages assume you know what you are doing, Rust tells you what you don't know. And I love that. However, these capabilities come with a learning curve. This short post is to provide links to the material I've found the most helpful in learning Rust!

The Rust Book

The Rust Book is the best place to start. It walks a user through Rust, what it's capable of, and how to use it. When I walked through the book, I read it at a high level first and then typed up each example with a Dockerfile so I knew how to use it with Docker. That was overkill. Looking back, I think the book is great at highlighting Rust and a good place to understand the syntax. But after you've read through it at least once and you start to think "OK, I kind of get where they are going with this..." I would move on to the following resources.

Tim McNamara's Rust in Action

Rust in Action by Tim McNamara is a great follow up to the rust book. I had been playing around with Rust for about 6 months before his book was released and ended up relearning the languages and walking back some bad habits I had developed between reading the Rust book and Tim's book. To me it was an easy read and the coding examples were helpful and easy to follow(That isn't to say they were simple, there was still a good deal of thought required for each example but the code was clean and short). Tim also points out helpful crates such as clap and serde.

Jon Gjengset Video's and Book(Rust for Rustaceans)

Jon Gjengset's videos have been the most helpful to me in teaching me how to think and problem solve in Rust. Rust for Rustaceans is a good follow up and even companion to the video but the videos honestly have been the most helpful. The book is still great, it's my second favorite tool for learning Rust. I just think the videos are what suits my learning style best. In both the videos and the book, Jon walks through topics in Rust, starting at a highly level and ending at the bare bones of it all. This all happens in a very clear step-wise style that I have adopted for programming my own apps.

The Docs

docs.rs contains the documents for all crates on cargo. One of the things I have adopted from Jon's workflow is going to the docs for a crate and just reading around. This has been the most helpful in understanding a crates functionality and API.

Conclusion

Hopefully this information helps anyone new to Rust! Please leave a comment if any of this was useful to you or if you have any other helpfully resources for learning Rust!