Rust for Rustaceans: Idiomatic Programming for Experienced Developers

---- Updated review, 2022-01-12 ----This is a great book, advancing your knowledge beyond all of the beginner books. There are many intro books that do a great job of presenting the basics of the language. But by their nature as beginner books, their intermediate-level discussions are limited and variable. "Rust for Rustaceans" is just what we need next, a book that covers numerous intermediate topics in a coherent and instructive way. It shows not the mechanics of the language as beginner books do, but the hows and whys of how to actually use Rust, how to think about writing code in Rust, and how to understand how to work with Rust.The rendering issues have been fixed. I received an email notifying me that a fix was available. Clicking the update button on the "digital contents" web page was not enough. I had to click remove, then re-download in the Kindle app to receive the fixed version.---- Original review follows ----This should be a great book, advancing your knowledge beyond all of the beginner books. The code examples don't render correctly, however, as of 2021-12-25, making it hard to understand what the author is trying to say. The lines are indented wrong and worse, wrap so that valid lines are written after // line comments. That means you have to work to determine when code is intended to be in the comment and when it's not. The author spends time carefully explaining code line by line with numbered markers, so it's particularly important for this book that the code renders readably. As is, it's too hard to understand the author's ideas without the code they're talking about presented clearly.__Attempts to work around__I was able to remove the book for a refund by going to the digital content / device management pages on my Amazon account. I then bought the digital version of the book directly from No Starch press. The MOBI format can be emailed to your kindle directly. It renders with formatting problems as well: Indentations are sometimes wrong. The line marker symbols render as normal text numbers at the start of lines, creating invalid code you have to interpret. The lines don't wrap incorrectly, however, so it's more readable than the Kindle version.The digital package from No Starch also includes a PDF version that can be sent to the Kindle by email if you make the subject line "convert". It renders like the MOBI on the Kindle, but worse because the letter spacings are often inconsistent.I tried converting the EPUB version to MOBI using software called Calibre (macOs), but that rendered with text line symbols as above.So it looks like there's no way to read this book correctly on the Kindle that I've found. The PDF version included in the No Starch digital package draws correctly, just not on the Kindle with the Amazon email conversion. So I'll read it on my laptop.Amazon, please fix. Later reviewers, please note if/when this is fixed?

Good book covering more advanced topics

Half way through this amazingly concise and advanced programming book (my 4th Rust book after coding through Rust by Example, the Rust Book, and the async + async-std book duo). The quest for the ultimate programming language is the road to insanity, until you you deep dive into Rust - this book certainly helps there ! Definitely worth reading at least twice. IMHO, this book is a great gateway into intermediate level Rust. Really enlightened by the deep dive into type internal representations (ch2) and the clarity of macro programming (ch7).

If you want to take your Rust knowledge to the next level, this is the book for you. Gjengset bolsters the reader's existing understanding of systems programming internals and provides rich context into what Rust does well. Each chapter is a great read with exploratory dives into how to understand concepts from scratch and serves as a great reference point to and from development.

So, having bought two books on the subject (the Rust Programming Language and Programming Rust by O'Reilly), I was deeply frustrated. For background, I have coded for over 40 years, from Pascal to C++ to Visual Basic to Java to Scala to recently Rust. I cannot say enough how *indispensable* this book is to truly understand the language.For at least a couple weeks, I tried to port over a small side project app from Scala to Rust. The *hours* of cryptic compiler conundrums drove me quite crazy. So you know, I posted on StackOverflow and scoured the Internet for specific error messages I received. Having "solved" many of them, none of the final product met my use cases or deepened my understanding of the language (to say nothing of how to code idiomatically).This book changed all that, at once! Just the first chapter! I am sure one can read the actual language spec for Rust to get an idea of how things work. Personally, would rather read a stereo manual or watch paint dry. Nowhere were the actual rules of the borrow checker or how that related to scoping or the stack versus the heap explained. Instead, there were quasi-mystical allusions to Rc, RefCell, Box and others.Not to knock the authors of the other two books, but they are simply not up to writing production-quality code beyond trivial examples (hey, I have a struct that has shared references, and I am not working with anything implementing the Copy trait). I do highly recommend buying one or the other for foundations, with a preference for the Rust Programming Language. However, you cannot possibly understand what your are doing or why the compiler is rejecting your code without reading Rust for Rustaceans.I will post a future edit as I work through the book. But to Jon Gjengest, thank you, thank you! Nowhere have I seen what the actual rules the compiler uses documented so completely. And for those who are disappointed with a lack of code examples, my experience is anything but. No, you will not learn how to write a web server or command line parser that you will likely never use yourself. On the other hand, you will really and truly understand the guidance the compiler is giving you.Five stars. No equivocation. If you only had to buy chapter one, it would be well worth the price for the pain it alleviates. Code on!

This was a beneficial guide to writing better-quality code. The author condenses his experience into several heuristics and good practices that are not obvious when starting in the Rust programming language.

I'm still working my way through some of the chapters but skipped ahead to chapter 13 (for no good reason). I was pleasantly surprised by the list of links to other rust resources, blogs, etc. It's worth checking out Jon's you-tube channel as well.

Jon's advice will save you weeks of frustration as you scale to larger & more complex projects.This book is also a great starting point for Rust if you are an expert in another language (c, c++, Go, Java, ...). The target audience is Senior Engineers and Architects (the subtitle is accurate)