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

The type of an owned string is `String`. You can test this by modifying the program above to have a type annotation, e.g.,

fn main() {
    let first_name = "Michael".to_owned();
    let last_name = " Snoyman";
    let full_name: String = first_name + last_name;
    println!("Full name is {}", full_name);
}



However, when you get a type error, the compiler will usually give you a slightly more verbose name. If I make a mistake and say `i32` instead of `String`, I’ll get this error message:

```text
error[E0308]: mismatched types
 --> main.rs:4:26
  |
4 |     let full_name: i32 = first_name.to_owned() + last_name;
  |                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ expected i32, found struct `std::string::String`
  |
  = note: expected type `i32`
             found type `std::string::String`
```

What exactly is this `std::string::String`? We’ve seen the `::` operator before with static methods, and it meant "grab the method inside this struct." It turns out that `::` generally means "grab this thing inside something else." `std` is short for "standard," and it’s a *crate*. A crate is a collection of functions, types, and other things you can use in Rust. The `std` crate contains all of the standard stuff you can use out of the box. Inside the `std` crate, we have the `string` *module*. A module is a way of grouping together related stuff. Inside the `std::string` module, we have the `String` struct.

You’re allowed to use either `String` or `std::string::String`, since `String` is a special struct that is automatically available for your use all the time. But the compiler will sometimes give the longer type, so it’s worth knowing about that.

**Exercise**

Rewrite the program so that `full_name` has the full type `std::string::String` in its type annotation.


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?

The Type of Owned Strings