Preface
Rust is a new programming language. It offers performance and safety that is equivalent to, or even surpasses, modern C++ while being a modern language with a relatively low barrier to entry. Rust's momentum, combined with its active and friendly community, promise a great future for the language.
While modern and fluent, Rust is not a particularly easy language. The memory management system keeps track of the life of every entity that is used in your program and is designed in such a way that this tracking can typically happen entirely at compile time. The Rust programmer's burden is to help the compiler when it cannot decide for itself what should happen. Since modern programming is possible without ever facing such responsibilities, a modern programmer may not immediately feel comfortable with Rust.
However, like all expertise and skill, the more difficult it is to attain, the more valuable it is, and this book is here to help you. This book covers the basics of Rust, enabling you to gain enough skills to start programming with it.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introducing and Installing Rust, deals with installing the Rust toolset and using the basic tools.
Chapter 2, Variables, focuses on using different kinds of variables.
Chapter 3, Input and Output, covers the basic I/O.
Chapter 4, Conditions, Recursion, and Loops, goes through the different loops and iterative methods of Rust.
Chapter 5, Remember, Remember, covers Rust's memory handling system.
Chapter 6, Creating Your Own Rust Applications, gives you the task of building a complete Rust application.
Chapter 7, Matching and Structures, teaches you compound data types and how to destructure them.
Chapter 8, The Rust Application Lifetime, covers Rust's unique ownership, borrowing, and lifetime system, which enables resource safety without garbage collection.
Chapter 9, Introducing Generics, Impl, and Traits, goes through Rust's generic types.
Chapter 10, Creating Your Own Crate, instructs you how to build your own contained packages of Rust code.
Chapter 11, Concurrency in Rust, looks at concurrency and parallelism techniques.
Chapter 12, Now It's Your Turn!, gives you another set of tasks to complete.
Chapter 13, The Standard Library, covers Rust's standard library.
Chapter 14, Foreign Function Interfaces, introduces techniques to interface Rust code with C programs.
What you need for this book
To really dive into the content of this book, you should write out the example code and do the exercises. For that, you'll need a fairly recent computer; a gigabyte of RAM should be enough for the purposes of this book, but the more you have the faster the builds will be.
Linux is the best supported operating system here, but Rust itself is a first-class citizen on macOS and recent versions of Windows, so all the examples should adapt well there.
Who this book is for
This book will appeal to application developers who would like to build applications with Rust. No knowledge of programming is required.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning. Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "A shorter form is available in the unwrap method. This is the same as the expect method, but it doesn't print out anything in case of a failure."
A block of code is set as follows:
let mut file = File::create("myxml_file.xml).unwrap();
let mut output = io::stdout();
let mut input = io::stdin(); Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
cd app_name cargo build app_name
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Open up Visual Studio Code and go to the Command Palette, either by the View menu or by the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + P (which may differ between platforms)."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear like this.
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learning-Rust. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!
Errata
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Questions
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