“The Rust Programming Language” by Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols

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Book can be read on-line: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/

Rating: 5/5 Stars

An excellent book that introduces the Rust programming language and why its features can make it a compelling systems level programming language. The book assumes the reader has some programming experience, so it doesn’t go into basic programming concepts, but instead shows how Rust handles some standard programming tasks in a safer (and maybe better) way than other systems programming languages.

Rust’s explicit use of ownership and keeping track of lifetimes enable the language to detect and alert programmers at compile time about issues with their code that would lead to memory access problems that are a major source of bugs in programs. Rust does not eliminate all bugs, but getting rid of memory access related bugs would be good for programming in general.

After covering those essential aspects of the language, the book then goes into some details about the ecosystem around Rust: separating code into libraries, producing test cases and documentation and adding dependencies and external libraries. The book also goes into some more advanced language features that can support object-oriented programming and use ‘unsafe’ features, where the programmer, instead of the language, has to take some responsibility to ensure the code is safe to use.

By the end of the book, you should have a good understanding of the language features and ready to produce code. The book also gives some pointers for those looking to use the more advance language features in their coding.

Book read from 2023/01/23 to 2023/03/23