Introduction

Chances are that by the time you're reading this, you have heard of the Rust programming language. Its popularity is steadily growing and it's been voted the most loved programming language on stackoverflow every single year since it's first public release in 2015. But why is that? Supposedly there are several reasons, but in my opinion, the most important one is that Rust makes it easy (or at least easier than other languages) to write high quality code.

In this book, I'm going to try and explain what exactly Rust does to aid you in writing better code. There are many features, most aren't even unique to Rust, but it's the integration and combination in a single language which unlocks their full potential. Maybe this can be done even better than Rust did, but in my opinion, no language has done it so far. What I'm not going to explain are basic programming concepts, so you should ideally have some experience in another system programming language, but any other programming language should get you there most of the way, too.

Of course, the book is going to be colored by my experiences with other languages. There was some JS that I don't like personally, some C++ that was a mess and some C# which was okay, but also had some weird quirks. Some of the features of Rust even got adopted by at least one of these languages in recent years.

The book is written in a way that later chapters may build on top of information delivered in earlier chapters, so reading it top to bottom should provide the best experience. I will also try to avoid showing features that are going to be explained later. In critical cases, I may provide a link to an earlier chapter introducing a concept for you to read up on, if you want.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.