Learning a new language is like building a house – the foundation needs to be strong. With a language that changes the way you think and reason about your code, there's always more effort involved in the beginning, and it's important to be aware of that. The end result, however, is that you get to shift your thinking with these new-found concepts and tools.
This chapter will give you a whirlwind tour on the design philosophy of Rust, an overview of its syntax and the type system. We assume that you have a basic knowledge of mainstream languages such as C, C++, or Python, and the ideas that surround object-oriented programming. Each section will contain example code, along with an explanation of it. There will be ample code examples and output from the compiler, that will help you become familiar with the language. We'll also delve into a brief history of the language and how it continues to evolve.
Getting familiar with a new language requires perseverance, patience, and practice. I highly recommend to all readers that you manually write and don't copy/paste the code examples listed here. The best part of writing and fiddling with Rust code is the precise and helpful error messages you get from the compiler, which the Rust community often likes to call error-driven development. We'll see these errors frequently throughout this book to understand how the compiler thinks of our code.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- What is Rust and why should you care?
- Installing the Rust compiler and the toolchain
- A brief tour of the language and its syntax
- A final exercise, where we'll put what we've learned together