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 write a function to produce a greeting for someone based on their job. Here’s one naive approach using `if`/`else`:

impl Person {
    fn greeting(&self) -> String {
        if self.job == Job::Teacher {
            format!("Hello, you're a teacher named {}", self.name)
        } else if self.job == Job::Scientist {
            format!("Hello, you're a scientist named {}", self.name)
        } else {
            format!("Huh, this shouldn't be possible...")
        }
    }
}


There are two problems with this approach:

  - I had to add a bogus `else` clause at the end to handle the possibility that the person is neither a teacher nor a scientist. However, we know that can never happen\! Nonetheless, if I leave that off, the compiler complains. That’s annoying.

  - If in the future you decide to add a new job (maybe a plumber), you may end up forgetting to update this method.

Fortunately, there’s a much better way to do this; by using a `match` expression. Let’s first see it in practice:

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?

Pattern Matching