Book Image

Rust Quick Start Guide

By : Daniel Arbuckle
Book Image

Rust Quick Start Guide

By: Daniel Arbuckle

Overview of this book

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 work?ow. 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.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Functions

We saw a couple of functions, in passing, in the last chapter when we looked at the automatically generated boilerplate code created by cargo new. What were we actually seeing, though?

A function is a sequence of instructions for the computer to follow. It's sort of like a recipe. We don't have to tell a person how much flour, sugar, and milk to use to bake cookies, if we know that they already have a cookie recipe. We can just say: Bake some cookies, please. It's similar with a function. We don't have to tell the computer exactly how to save some information to a database; if there's a save_to_database function, we can use it to do the job.

In Rust, instructions that can tell the computer to take action can only be written inside of functions. It all starts with a function called main, which can cause other functions to run, which can in turn...