References

This page serves as a place to collect link to rust content I either want to be able to find again or to content I want to easily be able to reference in bulk instead of on a per link basis.

Introductory Material

New to Rust not to programming

There is a lot of material on the Internet to learn rust, this is just a selection of material I’ve used or tested personally. If you were like me and don’t know if you even want to learn rust yet and don’t mind passively listening to a podcast (deductible from my “unfocused time” budget) to see if it’s something you want to invest “focus time” on, then I personally used the New Rustacean podcast to get a sense of the language without much opportunity cost. (A bit more explanation in the Podcast section).

• Courses - The best course I’ve done on rust is 100 Exercises To Learn Rust by Mainmatter. The principle author is Luca Palmieri who wrote Zero To Production In Rust, referenced in the bullet point on books.
• Books - It would be remiss of me not to lead with The Rust Book that many people start with. It’s pretty good and easy to follow. This is what I started with after the New Rustacean podcast. There is also an experimental interactive version hosted by the Cognitive Engineering Lab at Brown University. There is also a repository of rust book on github you can have a look at for other book options https://github.com/sger/RustBooks. If you intend to write a RESTful back end in Rust I can strongly recommend Zero To Production In Rust which I used personally and found tremendous value in. I really appreciated practical approach that was used to deliver the content that Luca used. He not only covers the recommended approach but covers other approaches one may “intuitively” come up with and explains the trade offs. This along with the full source code from the project, which makes great starter code for a project, and a discord for book owners where you can ask questions makes this a invaluable resource in my opinion. I think you will get more out of the book if you develop the example project along with the book but you can also just read it if you don’t feel like getting hands on and referring back to it after.

New to programming

I’ve started of teaching a few people to program from scratch using rust but due to changes in life circumstances I’ve never actually finished covering all the material I wanted to so I can’t vouch for this process working yet. I actually think rust isn’t that much harder to learn to program in, and it saves you from learning bad habits that you need to then later go back and fix. I personally suspect that people find rust hard because it’s different and I think going from rust to many other imperative languages is easier than the reverse.

Thus far I’ve found starting off people with the book Begin Rust which is designed for high school students seem to work well. The first 3 chapters are available for free on their website which allows me to start with new students and see if

1. they like the content and
2. if this is the right book to use with them.

It provides structure and exercise to work though. I’ve tried it with a few students ranging in age from 7 to 40 years. For the younger students I’ve had to cover a bit of the math but it didn’t seem like too much for them. They got it and were able to do some of the practice problems.

Official

• Rust Cookbook
• API Guidelines Checklist
• Naming conventions - API Guide
• Documentation - API Guide
• Implement From not Into - Trait std::convert::Into
• Selecting a collection - Module std::collections
• Setting up defaults - Trait std::default::Default
• Attributes - The Rust Reference
  • Code like #![] and #[]
• Minimal Reproducible Example tips - Stack Overflow Rust Info
• Conditional Compilation
  • The Rust Reference
  • Internal Notes
• Managing External Processes - Rust Cookbook
• Testing CLI Applications by running them
  • CLI Book
  • Example Snippet
• Filing reports of unclear error messages (Choose Diagnostic) - Rust Issues
• Crate.io and Docs.rs issue status - https://status.crates.io/
• Build Queue for Docs.rs - docs.rs
• Raw Pointers - std docs
• Magic Completions - Rust Analyzer User Manual
• Directory Traversal - Rust Cookbook
• Recommended way to write expect messages - std docs
• Types of enum variants - Rust by Example
• Using a your fork of a crate while developing a feature - The Cargo Book - Testing a bugfix

Reference Books (Also see Official)

• Collection patters, idioms and anti-patterns - Rust design patterns

Blog Posts

• Default arguments for functions in Rust using macros
• Explanation of Tracing Subscribers

Podcasts

• Rustacean Station - Current community run podcast
• Rust in Production - Interviews with companies using rust in production.
• RustShip - Interviews with companies that ship rust software.
• Self-Directed Research Podcast (SDR) - “Every week, a new presentation on what Amos or James has been up to. Usually: Rust, embedded, web servers, but anything is fair game.”, is what the top of their site says. Tracks with what I’ve heard so far (although no episodes for the year yet).
• Oxide and Friends - Not specifically a rust podcast but it’s from a company that uses rust and, as a result, rust comes up frequently.
• New Rustacean - Stopped but it’s where I started. This podcast introduced me to rust and got me excited before I read the book and actually tried it myself (was able to use commute time to see if I like this “rust thing” I kept hearing people talking about). I think the main reason it got me excited is that the author, Chris Krycho, spoke about the parts of rust that I was interested in and maybe contributed to making it easier to learn rust. I found learning rust easy but that’s not a sentiment I’ve heard from many other people so maybe this podcast played into what made it easy for me. Don’t have a counterfactual so I’ll never know.

Video

See here for youtube videos.

Useful crates

For some crates I have more detailed notes. For those their page title starts with “Crate “. And for ease of maintenance they are not duplicated here. So please do see the section page for rust to see the list.

• log - A lightweight logging facade
• log4rs - a highly configurable logging framework modeled after Java’s Logback and log4j libraries.
  • Logging patterns patterns
• tracing
  • Shorthand Macros
• float_eq - Compare IEEE floating point primitives, structs and collections for equality
• float_ord - Add Ord for floats (used as FloatOrd(1.0))
• inventory - Typed distributed plugin registration.
• dirs - Helps you find the suitable directory to use in a cross platform way
• secrecy - Simple secret keeping library. Small API surface and reasonable protection from mistakes.
• version - Provides the version information for your crate already parsed into the three components
• document_features - provides a macro that extracts “documentation” comments from Cargo.toml
• List of my crates on crates.io

GitHub Actions

• Toolchain

Lints

• The rustdoc book
  • In particular see the one for warning about unused dependencies