I’ve used Rust as a primary language since 2019, and I’ve been managing developers using Rust as a primary language since 2021.

For developers new to the language it can seem intimidating at first, but there are a number of helpful resources available to newer Rust developers to help understand the more complicated topics.

These resources are all available for free unless otherwise noted. This is not at all an exhaustive list but it’s the things that I’ve noticed over the years and my thoughts on them.

# Books

## The Rust Programming Language (aka “The book”)

This was the primary Rust learning material for several years. Written by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols-Goulding, this covers every major feature a professional Rust developer will need from hello world to a multithreaded web server from scratch. This book is freely available to anyone online via the link provided.

## (paid) Rust in Action

Tim McNamara’s book walks you through building a CPU in Rust to teach intermediate programmers how to build real systems.

## (paid, biased) Refactoring to Rust

This book about incrementally adding Rust to new software projects was written by me and Joel Holmes. While not directly intended to teach readers every Rust concept, its intended audience is developers from other programming languages with limited exposure to the language. Its earlier chapters take the time to teach important concepts like lifetimes, ownership, traits, error handling and more.

# Exercises

## Rustlings

This official project of the Rust foundation is a collection of short Rust coding exercises that you can do to familiarize yourself with reading and writing Rust.

## Excercism Rust track

Exercism is a free programming exercise site that was one of the first to offer a Rust track. Their exercises are designed to walk you through learning Rust, but it may have been eclipsed by other resources at this point.

## (paid) Ultimate Rust Crash Course

A junior engineer on my team took this course and I was able to see their learning as they progressed through it. I don’t think it’s a particularly good course for people looking to learn programming, it glosses over a lot of fundamental concepts rather quickly. The ownership video for example is 6 minutes long, followed by a 5 minute long references video, and I don’t see any video labeled as talking about lifetimes. That being said, it’s quite well reviewed which makes me think that it may be a good resource for experienced developers looking to transition into Rust programming.

# Documentation

Learning to read and understand documentation is a critical piece of software development that is often overlooked. Due to the complex nature of Rust’s strict type system, auto-generated documentation is often able to walk users through how to use a crate via clicking the links between methods and types.

You should take some time to familiarize yourself with the structures of the documentation and learn how to navigate them. Rust crates tend to have large API surfaces, and you can be a much more effective developer by learning how to explore APIs via documentation than by trying to rote-memorize the subset of the API you’re currently using.

There are two key resources that all Rust developers should be familiar with.

## Standard Library docs

The Rust standard library docs contain all of the types/functions/modules contained in the standard library.

## docs.rs

Once a side project, now an official part of the Rust foundation, http://docs.rs hosts auto-generated documentation for every crate published on http://crates.io. You can navigate to http://docs.rs/CRATE-NAME and get access to the documentation for that crate, including past versions.

# Videos

In addition to great written content, there is quite some amount of video content available if you prefer to learn by watching.

## Official Rust Youtube

Rust has an official Youtube channel that has video recordings of not just internal meetings, but also full talks from many Rust conferences like Rustconf, EuroRust, RustFest, and more!

## fasterthanlime

Amos has a youtube channel where he delves into some more advanced and interesting Rust topics.

## Tim McNamara

Tim makes a ton of Rust learning resources of various types. His youtube channel is a great resource if you like video content.

## My Youtube Channel

I don’t post videos often (ever), but I do have some videos on Rust development that may be interesting.