> When I started learning Rust I made the mistake of following the advice to read The Book first. While it's a great resource, it's pretty overwhelming for a beginner to get told "If you'd like to learn this programming language the best way to start is to read this 20 chapter book!" Most people give up before they even get started when they get advice like this. Nobody ever told someone to read a 20 chapter book just to get started with Javascript or Python. Rust's learning curve is no joke but you gotta give the people what they want, and they want to program, not read about programming. Programming is fun and reading about programming is not as fun.<p>As one of the authors of the book, I wholeheartedly agree that it's not for everyone. Folks should learn in the way that works well for them. I'm glad this resource exists!
I wish every language had the equivalent of <a href="https://tour.golang.org" rel="nofollow">https://tour.golang.org</a>.<p>Edit: hey thanks to both answers, bookmarking it for later. I'm learning Haskell right now and it definitely misses something like this.
Nice!<p>I just started learning Rust for a WebAssembly project.<p>The people on the Discord server are nice and quick to answer questions.<p>The ebooks I found online are a bit hard to grasp. At least for a JS dev like me.<p>I mean, for the basics they're okay, but what I'm missing is how to write "good Rust code". There are always multiple ways to do things (Option/Result, try!/?/unwrap/expect, loops/map/fold, etc.) and I already produced some runtime errors, haha
I've been working through the Rustlings exercises for the past week or two. I get through a handful at a time (spending 20 min to an hour) and have done maybe 5 or 6 sessions. It doesn't seem short to me (doesn't seem long either, but it isn't like I blew through it in a few hours). It can be confusing as the hints are sometimes really vague. I've cobbled my way through so far and if I've gotten stuck I just stop and come back to it another day. Usually I can progress quickly with fresh resolve. It is nice in that it helps you learn the syntax, but it doesn't seem to help me much with the concepts. I feel this is in part that when you run `rustlings watch` it doesn't first point you to the section of the book you're reading it just throws broken code at you and tells you to run `rustlings hint <foo>` which only sometimes points to the book. Most of the time you are just given broken code and asked to fix it with some suggestions of where to look in this specific code. I have completed 53 exercises and am in the process of working on standard library types. I could go into some more specific details if anyone is curious about my experience. Hoping to post my annotated work through to github when done, but I could either copy out the few bits that were particularly vexing or could post the code with my comments now for people to peruse. One thing I would like to find is a place to start interacting and asking questions. Heard someone mention discord so I'll maybe start there or on IRC.
Im kind of dismayed that we're told that reading about programming isn't fun. Also we're told what people like and what they don't. Is this what "people" like and don't like or what the author likes and doesn't like?<p>Learning the hard concepts in rust is exactly where the value lay for me. For some people I guess copying things and getting results without understanding is rewarding and I'd never say people shouldn't do that but author should not be telling people not to read. It's terrible advise.
+1 for rustlings, it's fantastic, I went through it right after reading through the book. The books are good, but it's hard to compete with being hands on like rustlings is.