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

Now that we have conditionals, we can start to put together more sophisticated programs than we’ve seen so far. Let’s write a function to compute factorials. Factorials multiply all the numbers down to 1. For example, the factorial of 5 is `5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1`. But there’s a different way to define factorials that also works.

  - The factorial of 0 is 1.

  - The factorial of `x` is `x` times the factorial of `x - 1`

**NOTE** We’re ignoring negative numbers and non-integers.

In fact, we can write exactly that code in Rust. If you’re brave, try writing a function called `fact` (short for factorial) that uses an `if`/`else` and calls itself. If you’re not brave, or when you want to check your answer, I’ve included a solution below.

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?

Factorial and Recursion