We saw cargo search earlier, which allowed us a quick and easy way to find third-party libraries from the command line, so that we could link them with our own program. That's very useful, but sometimes we want a little more information than what that provides. It's really most useful when we know exactly which library we want and just need a quick reference to the linking code.
When we don't know exactly what we want, it's usually better to use a web browser to look around https://crates.io/ and find options.
When we find an interesting or useful library in the web browser, we get the following:
- The linking code
- Introductory information
- Documentation
- Popularity statistics
- Version history
- License information
- A link to the library's web site
- A link to the source code
This richer information is useful for figuring out which library or libraries are best suited to our projects. Picking the best libraries for the job saves a lot of time in the end, so the web interface to crates.io is great.
The front page of crates.io shows new and popular libraries, divided up in several ways, and these can be interesting and useful to explore. However, the main value is the search box. Using the search box, we can usually find several candidates for any library needs we may have.