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

Quite a while ago, we mentioned that `main` can return a few things besides unit `()`. Now that we’ve learned about `Result`, it’s about time we demonstrated that. Behold, our error-inducing `main` function\!

fn main() -> Result<(), CantRide> {
    let family = [
        Person { name: "Alice".to_owned(), age: 30, height: 160 },
        Person { name: "Bob".to_owned(), age: 35, height: 170 },
        Person { name: "Charlie".to_owned(), age: 8, height: 100 },
        Person { name: "David".to_owned(), age: 12, height: 75 },
    ];

    println!("The price is {}", price_people(&family)?);
    Ok(())
}

struct Person {
    name: String,
    age: u32,    // in years
    height: u32, // in centimeters
}

impl Person {
    // Price to ride the roller coaster
    fn price(&self) -> Result<u32, CantRide> {
        if self.age < 10 {
            return Err(CantRide::TooYoung(self.name.clone()));
        }
        if self.height < 80 {
            return Err(CantRide::TooShort(self.name.clone()));
        }
        Ok(if self.age < 18 {
            5
        } else if self.age < 66 {
            8
        } else {
            7
        })
    }
}

fn price_people(people: &[Person]) -> Result<u32, CantRide> {
    let mut price = 0;
    for person in people {
        price += person.price()?;
    }
    Ok(price)
}

#[derive(Debug)] // for the output later
enum CantRide {
    TooShort(String),
    TooYoung(String),
}


There are three important things to point out here:

1.  The result type of `main` is `Result<(), CantRide>`. This says, if everything goes OK, I’ll produce a unit value. But if there’s a problem, I’ll produce a `CantRide`. Returning the unit value for the `Ok` variant is pretty common in Rust error handling code.
    
2. Inside the `println!` macro call, we’ve stuck a `?` right after the `price_people` function call.
    
3. That last line, `Ok(())`, is really interesting. Our `main` function needs to return a value of type `Result<(), CantRide>`, and so we need to make sure we provide it. You’ll end up seeing a lot of code in Rust that includes lines like that as the last line in the function.

The program above will produce the output `Error: TooYoung("Charlie")`. If you comment out the Charlie line, then you’ll get `Error: TooShort("David")`. And finally, if you comment out David too, you’ll get the output, `The price is 16`. Hurrah\!


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?

Errors in main