/dev/reading
Reading List

Dive into Rust

Books for the aspiring Rustacean.
Order by
View
by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols

The Rust Programming Language, 2nd Edition is the official guide to Rust 2021: an open source systems programming language that will help you write faster, more reliable software. Rust provides control of low-level details along with high-level ergonomics, allowing you to improve productivity and eliminate the hassle traditionally associated with low-level languages.

Klabnik and Nichols, alumni of the Rust Core Team, share their knowledge to help you get the most out of Rust’s features so that you can create robust and scalable programs. You’ll begin with basics like creating functions, choosing data types, and binding variables, then move on to more advanced concepts, such as:

  • Ownership and borrowing, lifetimes, generics, traits, and trait objects to communicate your program’s constraints to the compiler
  • Smart pointers and multithreading, and how ownership interacts with them to enable fearless concurrency
  • How to use Cargo, Rust’s built-in package manager, to build, document your code, and manage dependencies
  • The best ways to test, handle errors, refactor, and take advantage of expressive pattern matching

In addition to the countless code examples, you’ll find three chapters dedicated to building complete projects: a number-guessing game, a Rust implementation of a command line tool, and a multithreaded server.

Fast, Safe Systems Development
by Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff and Leonora F. S. Tindall

Systems programming provides the foundation for the world's computation. Writing performance-sensitive code requires a programming language that puts programmers in control of how memory, processor time, and other system resources are used. The Rust systems programming language combines that control with a modern type system that catches broad classes of common mistakes, from memory management errors to data races between threads.

With this practical guide, experienced systems programmers will learn how to successfully bridge the gap between performance and safety using Rust. Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff, and Leonora Tindall demonstrate how Rust's features put programmers in control over memory consumption and processor use by combining predictable performance with memory safety and trustworthy concurrency.

You'll learn:

  • Rust's fundamental data types and the core concepts of ownership and borrowing
  • How to write flexible, efficient code with traits and generics
  • How to write fast, multithreaded code without data races
  • Rust's key power tools: closures, iterators, and asynchronous programming
  • Collections, strings and text, input and output, macros, unsafe code, and foreign function interfaces

This revised, updated edition covers the Rust 2021 Edition.

by David MacLeod

One month. One hour a day. That’s all it takes to start writing Rust code!

Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches teaches you to write super fast and super safe Rust code through lessons you can fit in your lunch break. Crystal-clear explanations and focused, relevant examples make it accessible to anyone—even if you’re learning Rust as your first programming language.

By the time you’re done reading Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches you’ll be able to:

  • Build real software in Rust
  • Understand messages from the compiler and Clippy, Rust’s coding coach
  • Make informed decisions on the right types to use in any context
  • Make sense of the Rust standard library and its commonly used items
  • Use external Rust “crates” (libraries) for common tasks
  • Comment and build documentation for your Rust code
  • Work with crates that use async Rust
  • Write simple declarative macros
  • Explore test driven development in Rust

Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches is full of 24 easy-to-digest lessons that ease you into real Rust programming. You’ll learn essential Rust skills you can use for everything from system programming, to web applications, and games. By the time you’re done learning, you’ll know exactly what makes Rust unique—and be one of the thousands of developers who say it’s their best loved language!