13 years of senior developers share one year of Rust learning experience: from essential books to code exercises

How to learn Rust, there is such a tutorial on Hacker News.

It is different from similar hours of crash tutorials on the Internet, but points out a path to learning Rust through your own learning experience.

After the tutorial was released, netizens also posted their learning experiences on Hacker News.

It’s convenient to learn about Rust-related books and tutorials, even when you’re offline without an internet connection. I learned the basics of Rust on a long flight without WiFi. Really a great way to pass the time!

Reading books and writing code are both essential to learning a programming language, and alternating between the two is essential to mastering Rust.

Veteran developer Eli Bendersky blogs a lot about coding languages ​​on his website, including one about his own year-long learning of Rust.

Let’s take a look together.

Related bibliography black and red list

First, Eli reviews the Rust-related books he has read in the tutorial.

Programming Rust is generally viewed as an introductory book, and this is the first book Eli read when learning Rust.

The book is a preliminary introduction to Rust, including a comprehensive overview and reference of Rust 1.50.

Although it is an introductory book, it still requires a certain programming foundation and familiarity with low-level programming, especially memory management.

Overall, this book is a good and comprehensive overview of Rust for an experienced developer (preferably with a C++ background) who knows how to use alternative resources in a project.

Next is The Rust Programming Language , which Eli thinks would be a better reference than Programming Rust, although he hasn’t read the entire book in its entirety, but has gone through its main parts.

The book also ranks highly on Google, with many listing it as a Rust Beginner’s Guide, written by two members of the Rust core team, with feedback and contributions from 42 community members.

Likewise, a programming foundation is required to read this book, which means the material will be useful to developers with a variety of programming backgrounds.

To sum up, if you want to read these introductory Rust books, you must have a certain programming foundation first.

Next, let’s talk about Rust in Action , an intermediate-level book on Rust that includes several important projects in the field of systems programming.

In this book, the methods introduced are interesting and suitable for people who already have a preliminary understanding of Rust.

In addition to that, it focuses on systems programming and has written a lot of really useful code.

But the fly in the ointment is that since the book is still very new, there are many typos, confusions, serious mismatches between code listings and accompanying repositories, etc.

Finally, let’s talk about the book Rust for Rustaceans . First, let’s talk about the conclusion. It is not recommended to read.

Eli enjoyed some of the videos previously posted by Jon Gjengset, the author of this book, but was disappointed after reading the book.

The book is a mix of better explained material and overly specialized material from the official Rust book, just layer after layer of text, hardly any diagrams and code examples, hardly any compilable projects to do something useful .

You have learned about the books related to learning Rust, and you should also practice writing code properly after reading.

writing code practice

So, how can we practice effectively? Eli also recommended some channels based on his own experience.

If you are starting to learn Rust, start with rustlings , which are small exercises for reading and writing Rust code snippets. Although it is not very comprehensive, it is still quite useful for beginners.

The website is attached at the end of the article.

Let’s talk about Advent of Code , the 2021 edition is very suitable for practicing Rust, there are a total of 25 questions, write code according to the instructions in it, and complete the task.

Learning and practicing programming languages ​​is a great way to learn and practice programming languages ​​by solving AOC problems.

Eli has completed the previous 18 questions, and in the blog he also mentioned that it is likely that AOC2022 will be tackled in Rust again, keeping his touch.

The Ray Tracer Challenge book , which consists of a series of “unit tests” and pseudocode that is easily translatable into any language, can be used to guide us in implementing a ray tracer using a programming language.

While learning a new programming language, we can also build something visual that doesn’t get boring any time soon.

However, the book does nothing to help develop intuition by focusing on explaining why the formulas and pseudocodes it provides work.

This leads to serious errors when debugging problems. Since no intuition was developed, the only way to debug was to meticulously compare the code to the pseudocode in the book to make sure nothing was lost or mistyped during transcription.

Of course, overall, it’s still worth reading.

Finally, a word about Crafting Interpreters , in which the author develops two complete interpreters for the language from start to finish, including all front-end and back-end parts.

In the book, all code for both interpreters is completely contained within the text and presented in sections. There is no need to browse external repositories. Just read and copy the code into your own editor to run.

Eli also has high marks for this book, which he considers to be by far the most practical of the many compiler books he has read.

In addition to the above, Eli has done a lot of experiments, writing code to explore various areas of Rust.

If you are interested, you can click the link below to go to his website to see more~

The text and pictures in this article are from qubits

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