What next

We’ve reached the end of Idiomatic Rust in Simple Steps. So what next?

Other Learning Resources

If you’d like to dive into other learning resources, there’s a lot of really amazing stuff out there.

The official book, The Rust Programming Language is available in both “living digital” and “dead tree” versions. If you got all the way through IRISS and didn’t look at the official book yet… how and why? It’s amazing!

The official book goes into far more detail than IRISS, and makes fewer pains to avoid non-idiomatic examples or crates so gets to the point more directly. Particularly if you’ve gone through IRISS already, the official book will be a sinch to get through and give you a much broader view of the language.

For the more hands on, I can’t recommend Rustlings enough. It’s a collection of short exorcises that don’t just tell you how Rust works, but get you to write it. You run it locally, and you can only pass a section when your code works! It mirrors the official book pretty closely so working through both at the same time can really support your learning.

Similarly, Tour of Rust is another guide with embedded Rust Playground examples so that you can play with the things you’ve just learned.

If you’re more into visual learning, there are some great YouTube channels out there (including Fio’s Quest, obviously). Here are some of my favourites:

• No Boilerplate offers what Tris, the creator, describes as “Fast technical videos”. His video’s cover everything from high level concepts such as why Rust’s design makes certain choices and how they help you be a better developer, down to how to use specific language features. (Note: Tris’ video on “async isn’t real and can’t hurt you” convinced me to add a reminder that you don’t have to write async Rust to the async chapter)
• Let’s Get Rusty has a lower level focus than No Boilerplate. Bogdan, who runs the channel, goes into more detail on common idioms and specific crates you might need to learn for specific tasks.
• Chris Biscardi makes great guides on all things Bevy, showcases new Bevy games, tools and framework features. Even if game dev isn’t your thing, Chris routinely runs through Advent of Code problems, solving them with Rust, which is a great place to see smart algorithms written succinctly in idiomatic code. (Note: Chris is where I learned about nom, and how to do better parsing, discussion of which might have helped land my latest job!)

If you know of any other good guides or resources, please let me know! You can even send me a PR for the book on GitHub!

Start building

But the best way to learn Rust is to start building. Rust is one of the few languages that work in just about any field. What do you want to build?

To give you some food for thought, you can build command line apps, cross-platform GUI apps, full stack web apps, embedded microcontroller apps, machine learning tools, networking tools, video games, and even libraries that can be consumed by other programs. The list is essentially endless.

Early examples for me were;

• a CSV to Json converter using Serde. Serde, of no agreed pronunciation, is short for serialize, deserialize. It’s the goto tool for converting string data formatted in a variety of file formats, into data in your application and back again.
• A web server for reading specific details from a WordPress database using Actix Web and Diesel. Actix Web is an incredibly fast web server framework that’s surprisingly easy to work with. Diesel is a Database ORM that not only lets you read and write to databases, but can also manage things like table structure and migrations.
• A 250,000 cell Game Of Life in Web Assembly that ran at 60fps. Web Assembly isn’t a framework or library like other tools I’m listing here, it’s a compile target. You can compile Rust into Web Assembly. I would even go so far as to argue that, thanks to how Rust works as a language, and especially the supporting tooling, Rust should be everyone’s first choice when writing high performance code for frontend web.
• A command line flash card database using Clap and Sqlx. Clap is a tool for parsing command line arguments as well as providing a common experience across cli applications. Sqlx is another framework for working with Databases but doesn’t have the ORM features built into Diesel.

My advice is to think of something you’re missing in your life, ideally something that’s limited in scope and achievable. Plan out how you’d structure the solution, and try building it.

Cargo, Crates, and docs.rs

Very little of what we build is actually built from scratch. My goal with Idiomatic Rust in Simple Steps was to teach Rust without getting distracted with third party libraries (which, even the official book gets a little distracted with sometimes).

But now we’re past that and ready to get really stuck in to everything the ecosystem has to offer.

Like most modern languages, Rust has a default library collection called crates.io. In Rust parlance, we call external libraries “crates”. Here you’ll find a wealth of libraries for just about every use you can imagine. Whether you’re building for tiny embedded microcontrollers or data center scale, distributed, GPU-powered, AI tools.

When you create a project in Cargo, it will create a Cargo.toml manifest file. By adding libraries from crates.io to your [dependencies] (or [dev-dependencies]) section in your manifest file, Cargo will automatically download them for you, and you’ll be able to access them in your software.

Documentation for libraries can almost always be found on docs.rs (usually linked from the crate’s page on crates.io). docs.rs is built from rustdoc, which we covered in the documentation chapter. This means library documentation will always be structured in a familiar way making it easy to use.

Over to you

Where you go next is up to you, but I’d honestly love to hear about it. Fio’s Quest has a Discord server, and a community of wonderful, supportive people. Let us know what learning resources you’re using, or what apps or tools you’re building.