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

A `struct` in Rust allows you to create a new data type made up of values from other data types. So far, we’ve worked with *primitives*--things built into the language—​like an `i32`. But we can combine these primitives into larger, custom types. In this case, I want to define a new data type called `Fruit` that tells me how many apples and bananas I have. Let’s see what that looks like:

struct Fruit {
    apples: i32,
    bananas: i32,
}


`struct` starts a declaration, similar to how `fn` starts a declaration. In the case of `fn`, we’re declaring a new function name. In the case of a `struct`, we’re declaring a new type name. In this case, our data type is called `Fruit`. We’ll talk about why this is `Fruit` and not `fruit` in a little bit.

After the type name, we have an open curly brace, followed by a comma-separated list of *fields*. For example, `apples: i32` is a field. The field has a name, a colon, and then a type. This is really similar to what a parameter list in a function looks like.

Next, how do you *use* a `struct`? Here we get to introduce a new kind of expression, a *field access expression*. When you have a value of some `struct`, you can access it with the `value.field` syntax. Let’s see how we would implement our `count_fruit` function, now powered by a `struct`:

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?

Struct