Most of the team that I work with on a daily basis is heavily invested in Python. As such, it was difficult to find people interested in reading The Rust Programming Language, 2nd Edition. In the end, two members of the team tackled the book, and it took them longer to complete the read than I would have expected.
While I picked up the book, I just couldn’t get into it. That isn’t because of the book. I enjoyed what I read. I didn’t have a reason to learn a new programming language. I learned a long time ago that I can’t just learn a programming language for the sake of learning it. I need a reason to want to dive into it, and right now, there’s nothing I can’t do in Python that I feel like I need to learn a new language to accomplish.
I think that from a learning standpoint, the book is well structured and builds to a final project that makes a lot of sense. In fact, that final project is what drove me to pick up the book. Building a multithreaded web server sounds like a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I discovered that I wanted a tutorial on building a multithreaded web server that is annotated to explain the language. In other words, I don’t want to learn and understand the language. I just want to do the fun stuff. This book is designed to help you learn and understand the language, and I feel like the people who read it really understood that.
“The Rust Programming Language” by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols introduces readers to the Rust programming language. The book explains the basic concepts of the programming language and demonstrates the concepts by building programs. The authors explain the protections Rust has implemented to prevent the common vulnerabilities plaguing other programming languages. This is demonstrated by creating programs that cannot be built because the issue is caught. In the final chapter, the authors demonstrate how to build a very basic web server and then add threading to accommodate multiple requests. This chapter gives readers an opportunity to use their knowledge from previous chapters and visualize the result in a web browser.
That’s my opinion though, let’s see what other members of the team thought.
Rating: 4.3/5.0
– Andrew Swoboda, Senior Cybersecurity Researcher, Fortra
"The Rust Programming Language" was a breath of fresh air when it came to learning a new programming language. There are many things that can be off-putting when trying to learn a new language, whether that it is understanding new syntax, how the language is typed, or just dealing with something that is, simply put, new to you. The Rust Programming Language book does a good job of teaching the reader the basics and core concepts of the Rust language, starting with a little game. The reader then receives more information about some of the concepts that were covered in their game and can build on what they learned throughout the book. One of my favorite things about this book was how easy it was to follow along during the coding exercises when changes were made to the code. Having the code that does not need to be altered greyed out and changes that needed to be made to the code in bold made it much easier to follow along with the coding exercises.
I would recommend this book if you are looking to get into Rust or if you are just looking for a new programming language to pick up. The authors do a good job of explaining the core concepts and touch on how to write cleaner, more readable code throughout the book.
Rating: 5.0/5.0
– Matthew Jerzewski, Cybersecurity Researcher, Fortra
I don’t feel that I should give the book a rating because I did not read very much of it. I do, however, recommend the book to anyone looking to learn the language because I thought the parts I did read were very well written.
Overall Rating: 4.65/5
Up next will be Black Hat GraphQL by Dolev Farhi and Nick Aleks.
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