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

Every value in Rust lives somewhere in your computer’s memory. And every place in computer memory has an address. It’s possible to use `println` and the special `{:p}` syntax to display the address itself:

fn main() {
    let x: i32 = 5;
    println!("x == {}, located at {:p}", x, &x);
}


On my computer, this prints `x == 5, located at 0x7ffeeb9b68f4`. A reference can be thought of as a *pointer*; it’s an address pointing at a value that lives somewhere else. That’s also why we use the letter `p` in the format string to print the address.

When you have a variable like `let y: &i32 = &x`, what this means is:

  - `y` is an immutable variable

  - That variable holds an address

  - That address points to an `i32`

  - The reference is immutable, so we can’t change the value of the `i32`

On the other hand, `let y: &mut i32 = &mut x` is almost exactly the same thing, except for the last point. Since the reference is mutable, we can change the `i32` value.

It’s technically possible to do things like `let mut y: &i32 = &x`. But what this would mean is that you can change the *address* that’s in `y`, not the value the address points to. There may be some cases where that’s useful, and the language allows it. But for the most part, you just don’t want to do it. In practice in Rust, therefore, you’ll usually end up with one of four variable types:

  - An immutable variable holding a value directly, e.g., `let fruit: Fruit = Fruit { …​ };`

  - A mutable variable holding a value directly, e.g., `let mut fruit: Fruit = Fruit { …​ };`

  - An immutable variable holding an immutable reference, e.g., `let fruit_ref: &Fruit = &fruit;`

  - An immutable variable holding a mutable reference, e.g., `let fruit_ref: &mut Fruit = &mut fruit;`

The other two possibilities, which we almost never want, are:

  - A mutable variable holding an immutable reference, e.g., `let mut fruit_ref: &Fruit = &fruit;`

  - A mutable variable holding a mutable reference, e.g., `let mut fruit_ref: &mut Fruit = &mut fruit;`

In other words, don’t make variables mutable when they’re holding references.


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?

What's In a Reference?