Book Image

Mastering Rust - Second Edition

By : Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta
Book Image

Mastering Rust - Second Edition

By: Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta

Overview of this book

Rust is an empowering language that provides a rare combination of safety, speed, and zero-cost abstractions. Mastering Rust – Second Edition is filled with clear and simple explanations of the language features along with real-world examples, showing you how you can build robust, scalable, and reliable programs. This second edition of the book improves upon the previous one and touches on all aspects that make Rust a great language. We have included the features from latest Rust 2018 edition such as the new module system, the smarter compiler, helpful error messages, and the stable procedural macros. You’ll learn how Rust can be used for systems programming, network programming, and even on the web. You’ll also learn techniques such as writing memory-safe code, building idiomatic Rust libraries, writing efficient asynchronous networking code, and advanced macros. The book contains a mix of theory and hands-on tasks so you acquire the skills as well as the knowledge, and it also provides exercises to hammer the concepts in. After reading this book, you will be able to implement Rust for your enterprise projects, write better tests and documentation, design for performance, and write idiomatic Rust code.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Getting Started with Rust

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