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)

Summary

Ownership is the thing that most separates Rust from other programming languages. It's an idea that seems obvious at first, then surprisingly complicated, and finally powerful and useful. Ownership gives Rust its nearly-free automatic memory management, along with things such as safe and easy multithreading and concurrency, and just generally being able to spot more errors in the compiler than other languages can.

Borrowing makes use of ownership to create a safe version of one of the biggest problem points for other languages: accessing data via a memory address. Mistakes with memory addresses are one of the most common problems programs encounter and, in Rust, those mistakes are caught by the compiler and reported along with helpful hints about how to address them.

In this chapter, we also looked at how to implement consuming, read-only, or read-write functions...