The Best Way to Learn Rust Programming

Rust has emerged as a prominent systems programming language, capturing the attention of developers worldwide due to its focus on performance, safety, and concurrency. More than 13% of developers worldwide in 2024 are making it a programming language to learn. For those looking to advance their careers in the tech industry, learning Rust from scratch can be highly beneficial. While experts may not recommend it as a first language, Rust can significantly enhance a developer's skill set and open doors to new opportunities.

What is Rust?

Rust is designed to be as fast as C and C++ while providing memory safety. Created by Mozilla Research and first released in 2010, Rust distinguishes itself with a unique approach to memory safety, eliminating common bugs and security vulnerabilities prevalent in languages like C and C++.

Key features of Rust include:

Memory Safety: Rust ensures memory safety without needing a garbage collector.
Concurrency: Rust’s concurrency model allows for safe concurrent programming.
Performance: Rust is designed to be as fast as C and C++ while providing memory safety.

Is Rust Worth Learning?

Learning Rust is worth it. The demand for Rust developers is rising as more industries recognize the benefits of using Rust for secure and efficient software development. Rust is now widely used in web development, game development, and blockchain. Investing time in learning Rust will position developers at the forefront of innovative, high-performance software solutions.

Roadmap to Learn Rust

Before diving in, it's essential to have a structured learning roadmap to ensure you don't miss any critical steps and utilize the best available resources.

1. Set up the Learning Environment

Setting up a Rust learning environment is very important. Install Rust from here first. Once rustup is installed, you can install the latest stable version of Rust with the rustup command.

Cargo, Rust’s package manager and build system, is installed alongside Rust and is essential for managing dependencies, building projects, and running tests. You can create a new project with Cargo’s new project_name, compile it with Cargo build, and run it with Cargo run.

Choosing the right integrated development environment (IDE) or code editor is crucial for an efficient Rust development workflow. Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and IntelliJ IDEA are some of the best. Setting up these tools ensures a productive and streamlined coding experience.

2. Get Started with the Rust Basics

Once you’re done with setting up your Rust environment, it is time to start with the basics. Currently, utilizing online resources like courses, certifications, and even programming books is important. Start with basics like variables, data types, functions, etc., in Rust language. Learning these basic concepts can help you get started with Rust programming. This step will be much easier if you have some previous programming knowledge.

Understanding control flow is also essential when learning Rust from scratch. Rust uses conditionals and loops to manage code execution based on certain conditions. Using if else and else if statements allow you to execute different code blocks.

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Another key aspect to learn while you’re at basics is understanding that what makes Rust unique is its memory management. Rust’s memory is based on ownership and borrowing. Ownership ensures that each value has a single owner, and when the owner goes out of scope, Rust automatically cleans up the memory, which prevents leaks. Borrowing allows references to values without transferring ownership, using immutable references (&T) for read-only access and mutable references (&mut T) for read and write access.

3. Engage with Community

Learning by yourself can be challenging. Learners can lose motivation quickly. That is why it is important to participate in Rust communities. Tech communities can be very beneficial for learners. Some communities have many tech experts who can help you whenever you feel stuck. You can mention your problems there, and they can quickly give you an expert opinion.

4. Practical Learning: Building a Project

Practical learning is crucial in coding. Learning Rust can be much easier when you’re practicing and building something. Working on and building projects can help learners understand what they need to focus on.

Educative offers a variety of Rust projects that allow learners to tackle real-life problems and gain practical deployment experience. Whether you’re interested in creating an e-commerce store or developing GitHub actions, Educative’s Rust projects provide valuable hands-on experience to enhance your Rust programming skills. Dive into these projects to build, test, and deploy your applications, all while strengthening your understanding of Rust.

5. Explore Advanced Topics

As you progress, dive deeper into memory management and concurrency features to understand Rust’s true strength. Rust’s memory management system, based on ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes, ensures memory safety without a garbage collector. This allows for high performance and low-level control, similar to languages like C and C++, but with extra safety guarantees.

Writing efficient and idiomatic Rust code involves following best practices and common patterns. Idiomatic Rust emphasizes clear and concise code that leverages the language’s features, such as pattern matching, error handling with Result and Option, and iterators and closures.

We suggest checking out the ultimate guide to Rust programming to cover the advanced topics. Understanding and applying these principles helps write performant, maintainable, and readable code, leveraging Rust’s full potential.

Rust's Unique Approach

Rust is not C or C++ so the way your accustomed to do things in those languages might not work in Rust. The generally recommended path is to start by reading the books, and doing small coding exercises until the rules around borrow checking become intuitive. Once this happens, then you can expand to more real world projects. If you find yourself struggling hard with the borrow checker, seek help. Rust is a particular language that works best when you work with how it wants you to do things.

Error Handling

Rust has an error handling mechanism that may be unfamiliar to you if you have a C/C++/C# background.

Web Assembly

Rust has a great Web Assembly story.

Embedded Programming

Rust allows you to replace C in your embedded work flows.

Note: If your background is in C/C++ you might be tempted to implement a doubly-linked list in Rust.

Key Concepts in Rust

Rust is neither an object-oriented nor a functional programming language. It doesn’t feature classes and doesn’t directly support object-oriented patterns. Programs in Rust are structured as collections of functions combined in modules. Functions manipulate values. Values are statically typed, meaning every value or expression should have an assigned type at compile time. Rust provides both primitive and compound types (arrays and structs), and its standard library also provides many additional types for collections of values. Rust supports generic types, which makes it possible to avoid mentioning specific types and provide more general definitions. Rust also provides traits as collections of methods (i.e. functions) that can be implemented for specific types.

Memory Management

Rust’s approach to memory management is based on the following principle: the Rust compiler must know the precise locations in the code where memory is allocated, where and how it’s accessed, and where it’s no longer needed. This knowledge allows for controlling memory access and freeing allocated memory automatically by inserting the corresponding instructions directly into the generated code, thus avoiding many common pitfalls other languages might be susceptible to. This approach differs from automatic memory management (as in JavaScript, Python, Java, or C#), where memory fragments that are no longer needed are detected at runtime and garbage is collected. The compiler’s requirements can be too strict.

Despite passing references around, the numbers variable still owns the allocated memory. Rust defaults to read-only memory access, requiring explicit specification for write access.

Concurrency

Concurrency is the ability of a system to execute multiple tasks or processes simultaneously or in overlapping periods to improve efficiency and performance. Rustaceans often describe Rust’s concurrency as fearless. Although concurrency is not the first thing beginners learn when approaching Rust, it is still easier to grasp than in many other programming languages.

Package Management with Cargo

Rust projects rely on Cargo, a package manager. In Rust, packages are called crates. In this program, we get the current (local) date and time, format it as a day of the week, and then print a result. Learning basic syntax, data types, and control structures (if-conditionals, loops, etc.) in Rust is a parallel process to learning about the available crates and what they provide. Once you can run Rust programs, you’ll be ready to work with external dependencies.

Effective Learning Strategies

If you’ve ever learned a foreign language, you know that various skills are required, such as reading, writing, listening, and speaking. There are also different types of activities to develop these skills. Teachers always encourage you to read texts, watch videos, listen to podcasts, speak whenever possible, post on social media, etc. Learning programming languages is no different. Note that there should be a balance between reading about programming and writing code. It’s impossible to master a programming language without actually writing code. When you write code, it’s important to both replicate externally crafted exercises and follow your own (or borrowed) ideas for developing simple applications. Ensure that your exercises are not limited to grasping algorithms but also teach language features and library functionalities. When developing simple applications, you learn to choose a language feature or a library that best suits your goal. So, the key to successful learning is combining all the approaches.

Recommended Resources

The Rust Programming Language: This is an official, regularly updated book for those learning Rust. It is known as The Book within the community. I also recommend another version of this book that adds more interactivity, such as quizzes, visualizations, and exercises. This version was developed by Brown University researchers Will Crichton, Gavin Gray, and Shriram Krishnamurthi.
Rust By Example: While the book talks about code with a lot of words, RBE shows off a bunch of code, and keeps the talking to a minimum.
Rustlings: Alternatively, Rustlings guides you through downloading and setting up the Rust toolchain, and teaches you the basics of reading and writing Rust syntax, on the command line.
The Rustonomicon: Curious about the darkest corners of the language? The Rustonomicon is your guidebook to the dark arts of unsafe Rust.
Rust Atomics and Locks: After a few months of learning Rust, you should check out Mara Bos’s Rust Atomics and Locks.
Comprehensive Rust: Comprehensive Rust is a Rust tutorial developed internally at Google but available to everyone.
This Week in Rust: This Week in Rust is the most important community resource for reading Rust-related news.
Rust for Beginners: Rust for Beginners is a crash course by the Microsoft Developer team. The course focuses on the foundation of Rust, from setting up Rust on your local computer to core functionality of the language, such as if/else statements, for loops, functions, and other core operators.
Rust 101 Crash Course: The Rust 101 Crash course by Jayson Lennon provides an in-depth introduction to Rust. This 6-hour course includes practical exercises and is also for beginners.
Rust Programming Tutorial: This crash course covers the foundation of Rust (similar to the Microsoft Developer course).
Let’s Get Rust: Here is a YouTube channel that is fully dedicated to Rust programming.

Overcoming Challenges

Learning Rust can be challenging. However, you can overcome these difficulties and master the language with the right strategies.

Understand the ownership model. Rust’s ownership model, which includes concepts like ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes, is often the most challenging aspect for beginners. Start with small examples and practice frequently.
Take your time with the borrow checker. The borrow checker can be frustrating, as it’s strict and may lead to confusing compiler errors. When you encounter borrow checker issues, take a step back and analyze what Rust is trying to prevent. Experiment with approaches like referencing or cloning data (but try not to clone everything!). Don’t be afraid to ask for help on forums like Reddit or the Rust Community Discord server. It’s really useful to understand what precisely a borrow checker is.
Leverage Rust’s excellent documentation. Rust is a relatively new language, so some things might not be as straightforward as in more established languages. Use the Rust documentation, which is known for being comprehensive and well-written.
Start with simple projects. Rust’s complexity can make even simple projects feel overwhelming at first. Start by implementing basic programs and gradually move to more complex ones.
Learn your code editor or IDE. Writing Rust code manually can be error-prone.
Participate in the Rust community. Learning a new language can feel isolating. Engage with the Rust community by contributing to open-source projects, joining Rust-focused chat rooms, or participating in forums.
Learn from mistakes. Rust’s compiler is strict, and it can feel like you’re constantly fighting with it. View each compiler error as a learning opportunity. Rust’s error messages are often very descriptive and guide you toward the correct solution.
Be patient. It’s easy to get discouraged with Rust. Remember that Rust is designed to be safe and efficient, which requires you to learn some complex concepts.
Join Rust learning groups. Many developers are learning Rust, and joining a group can provide support and motivation.

Mastering Rust takes time, but the payoff is worth it. Rust’s features, like its memory safety guarantees and performance, make it a powerful language for systems programming, web development, and more.

Rust in Real-World Applications

Let’s now briefly examine Rust’s suitability for building real-world applications.

Web Development

The Rust ecosystem is perfectly suitable for backend web development. Many frameworks and libraries perform general web development tasks, such as HTTP request routing, JSON and form handling, templating, database access, authentication and authorization, logging and tracing, etc., with production-ready performance. I recommend looking at the AreWeWebYet? Most web frameworks for Rust are easy to start with, and their documentation is awesome, partly thanks to the competition between them. For example, the Actix Web community provides a nice and up-to-date collection of examples. My colleague Khalid Abuhakmeh wrote a tutorial for beginners on building a simple HTML web application that uses Rocket, another web framework for Rust, as a backend. Luca Palmieri, whom I mentioned earlier, authored a book, Zero To Production in Rust, that helps you become a web backend developer, and he also works on Pavex, an emerging and promising web framework. One exciting thing about the latter project is that Luca carefully documents design choices in a series of progress reports. It’s constantly engaging to see why things are designed the way they are and not in some other way. Rust is also active on the web frontend, though it may not be 100% ready for production.

Tooling and Libraries

I wonder if Rust designers envisioned Rust becoming a language of choice for those who develop tooling and libraries for other programming languages, especially Python and JavaScript. The PyO3 project enables developers to implement native Python modules in Rust and to access Python in Rust binaries. By leveraging PyO3, you can provide an extremely efficient Rust implementation of a Python library for Python developers. Deno, a JavaScript runtime developed in Rust, delivers very good performance. This is not the only example from the JavaScript ecosystem.

Systems Programming

Undoubtedly, Rust shines in systems programming. Speakers from Google and Microsoft confirm that introducing Rust into their codebases lessens the number of security vulnerabilities, increases performance, and also keeps or sometimes improves the productivity of software developer teams. Amazon not only supports Rust development on AWS but also uses it directly to implement their own infrastructure. Cloudflare, a company that builds content delivery networks and other networking infrastructure, relies on Rust in a lot of low-level projects and contributes their frameworks to the Rust ecosystem. Ferrous Systems, a company that backs the development of rust-analyzer, also develops Ferrocene, a certified Rust toolchain for mission-critical applications. Together with other developments, this enables Rust to be used in the automotive and aerospace industries.

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