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

  - Everything we use in our program must be stored in memory

  - The stack is the primary place where our values are stored

  - The stack cannot hold Dynamically Sized Types

  - Strings are Dynamically Sized Types, and therefore we store references to them on the stack

  - String literals are stored in program memory

  - References to string literals have a special reference lifetime, `'static`

  - You can heap allocate memory for strings

  - The `String` struct wraps up a heap allocation in a type that can be stored on the stack

  - The `String` struct is also known as an owned string, while `str` is a string slice

  - You can use the `+` operator to combine owned strings

  - The long name for `String` is `std::string::String`, which you’ll sometimes see in error messages

  - Thanks to deref coercion, when you borrow a `String`, you can get either a `&String` or a `&str`

  - When you write functions, it’s better to use `&str` rather than `&String` as parameters so that your functions work on both owned strings and string literals

  - It’s typically best practice to store owned `String`s in structs rather than references

  - You can use the `format!` macro to construct `String`s

  - Owned `String`s automatically handle freeing of memory, and prevent a lot of very common bugs


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?

Summary