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

In this chapter, we've seen how to use pattern patching to enhance our ability to make decisions and assign variables. In particular, we've learned the following:

  • How to assign part of a data value to a variable by matching the whole value to a pattern that matches the part we're interested in to a variable name
  • How to use if let and else if let to decide whether a particular branch of an if chain should run
  • How to use match to check a single value against multiple patterns
  • How to use _ as a don't care in patterns
  • The difference between a pattern that matches a borrowed value and a pattern that borrows a matched value
  • How to match patterns for complex, nested data structures
  • Surprises that can arise when we use pattern matching, and how to deal with them

We'll be seeing more pattern matching in the next chapter, when we look at enumerations,...