Rust Essentials

Discover how to use Rust to write fast, secure, and concurrent systems and applications

• Learn how to create secure and blazingly fast programs in Rust
• Start working with Rust in a multicore and distributed environment
• Explore the core characteristics of Rust - safety, performance, and concurrency - to build error free and robust code

This book is intended for software developers interested in systems level and application programming, and are looking for a quick entry into using Rust and understanding the core features of the framework. It is assumed that you have a basic understanding of Java, C#, Ruby, Python or JavaScript.

• Set up your Rust environment for maximum productivity
• Bridge the performance gap between safe and unsafe languages with Rust
• Use pattern matching to create flexible code
• Apply generics and traits to develop widely applicable code
• Organize your code in modules and crates
• Build macros to extend Rust's capabilities and reach
• Apply threads to tackle problems concurrently and in distributed environments
• Interface with C and isolate unsafe code

Starting by comparing Rust with other programming languages, this book will show you where and how to use Rust. It will discuss primitive types along with variables and their scope, binding and casting, simple functions, and ways to control execution flow in a program.

Next, the book covers flexible arrays, vectors, tuples, enums, and structs. You will then generalize the code with higher-order functions and generics applying it to closures, iterators, consumers, and so on. Memory safety is ensured by the compiler by using references, pointers, boxes, reference counting, and atomic reference counting. You will learn how to build macros and crates and discover concurrency for multicore execution.

By the end of this book, you will have successfully migrated to using Rust and will be able to use it as your main programming language.