Rust Quick Start Guide

Get familiar with writing programs in the trending new systems programming language that brings together the powerful performance of low-level languages with the advanced features like thread safety in multi-threaded code

Key Features

• Learn the semantics of Rust, which can be significantly different from other programming languages
• Understand clearly how to work with the Rust compiler which strictly enforces rules that may not be obvious
• Examples and insights beyond the Rust documentation

Book Description

Rust is an emerging programming language applicable to areas such as embedded programming, network programming, system programming, and web development. This book will take you from the basics of Rust to a point where your code compiles and does what you intend it to do!

This book starts with an introduction to Rust and how to get set for programming, including the rustup and cargo tools for managing a Rust installation and development workflow.

Then you'll learn about the fundamentals of structuring a Rust program, such as functions, mutability, data structures, implementing behavior for types, and many more. You will also learn about concepts that Rust handles differently from most other languages.

After understanding the Basics of Rust programming, you will learn about the core ideas, such as variable ownership, scope, lifetime, and borrowing. After these key ideas, you will explore making decisions in Rust based on data types by learning about match and if let expressions. After that, you'll work with different data types in Rust, and learn about memory management and smart pointers.

What you will learn

• Install Rust and write your first program with it
• Understand ownership in Rust
• Handle different data types
• Make decisions by pattern matching
• Use smart pointers
• Use generic types and type specialization
• Write code that works with many data types
• Tap into the standard library

Who this book is for

This book is for people who are new to Rust, either as their first programming language or coming to it from somewhere else. Familiarity with computer programming in any other language will be helpful in getting the best out of this book.

Table of Contents

1. Getting Ready
2. Basics of the Rust Language
3. The Big Ideas-Ownership and Borrowing
4. Making Decisions by Pattern Matching
5. One Data Type Representing Multiple Kinds of Data
6. Heap Memory and Smart Pointers
7. Generic Types
8. Important Standard Traits

Daniel Arbuckle holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. While at USC, he performed original research in the Interaction Lab (part of the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems) and the Laboratory for Molecular Robotics (now part of the Nanotechnology Research Laboratory). His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and in the proceedings of international conferences.