Preface

Do you want to build modern web applications that are fast, safe, and scalable but without sacrificing developer productivity? Rust is no longer limited to systems programming. It has rapidly emerged as a powerful and reliable choice for web development, combining memory safety, performance, and concurrency in a single language. This book shows you why Rust is becoming a serious contender for building web applications and how you can start using it today, even if you have no prior experience with Rust. Designed with a gentler learning curve, this new edition helps you understand Rust concepts in the context of web development, making it easier to transition from other programming languages.

You’ll begin by exploring the Rust ecosystem for the web and getting hands-on with popular and emerging frameworks such as Actix, Axum, Rocket, and Hyper. You’ll expand into frontend integration, injecting Rust into the browser using WebAssembly and configuring secure HTTPS connections with NGINX.

As you progress, you’ll dive deeper into asynchronous programming, exploring TCP networking, framing, and the design of async systems. These concepts will help you understand how Rust handles concurrency and performance at scale, preparing you to build responsive and resilient web services.

Throughout the book, you’ll apply what you learn by building a complete to-do application with authentication using a microservice-based architecture. This application will compile into a single Rust binary, embedding a frontend JavaScript application directly within it. You’ll also implement end-to-end atomic testing and create a deployment pipeline to ensure your application is production-ready.

By the end of this book, you’ll have a deep understanding of why Rust matters for web development and the confidence to build robust, scalable, and high-performance web applications from scratch using Rust.