Gain insights into Rust programming fundamentals, explore its syntax, ownership, and type system, and delve into core components like memory management, traits, and generics to enhance your skills.

Rust is quickly becoming one of the most popular languages. With a strong basis as a systems and embedded language, its clean design and ergonomics makes it an emerging choice for general purpose programming tasks as well. This course will be your guide to the fundamentals of programming and Rust. Whether you have no experience or want to learn a new language, this is the place to start.

In this course, you’ll start off with the basics of the Rust programming language, learning the syntax, the philosophy of the language, and the anatomy of Rust. With that in hand, you’ll move onto some of the more unique parts of Rust, such as expression-oriented programming, ownership, and its strong type system.

In the latter half of the course, you’ll work through some of the core components of Rust such as references, memory management, mutability, traits, slices, and generics.

By the time you finish, you’ll have the foundations in place to learn more advanced concepts and take your Rust programming to the next level.

The Ultimate Guide to Rust Programming

Let’s say I’m selling movie tickets and we give a discount to people under 18, as well as to people 65 and older. I’d like to write a function `gets_discount()`. I can state the requirement in almost-code as `age < 18 OR age >= 65`. Unfortunately, that `OR` isn’t real Rust code. Instead, it’s time to introduce the **or** operator, which is two pipes `||` (hold shift and hit the backslash key on most keyboards).

**Exercise**

Implement the `gets_discount` function correctly to make this program pass.

fn gets_discount(age: u32) -> bool {
    unimplemented!() // replace this!
}

fn main() {
    // Kids
    assert_eq!(gets_discount(7), true);
    assert!(gets_discount(8));
    assert!(gets_discount(17));

    // Adults
    assert_eq!(gets_discount(18), false);
    assert!(!gets_discount(30));
    assert!(!gets_discount(64));

    // Seniors
    assert!(gets_discount(65));
    assert!(gets_discount(70));

    println!("Success!");
}


The **or** operator is binary, so it takes two values. I’ll explain this the same way I explained or above.

1.  If either or both values are true, it evaluates to true, otherwise, it evaluates to false.

2.  If either or both values are false, it evaluates to false, otherwise it evaluates to true.

3.  If the first value is false, it’s false; otherwise it’s the result of the second value.

4.  Or use the table again!
    
| x     |     y |     x \|\| y | 
|-------|-------|--------------| 
| true  |   true    |  true            | 
| true |   false    |   true           | 
|  false     |  true     |   true     | 
| false | false      |  false            | 


Going back to our example above: we wrote a `gets_discount` function. Let’s say we want the opposite of that, a `pays_full_price` function. One easy way to write that is to piggy-back on `gets_discount`:

Welcome to Begin Rust

Hello World and variables

Anatomy of Rust

Functions

Booleans

Conditionals

Mutable variables and while loops

Structs and ownership

References

Methods

Strings

Arrays, Vecs, and slices

Type parameters

Traits

Enums

Iterators and for loops

Early exit

What’s next?

And/Or