Rust Books

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Books

Starter Books

The Rust Programming Language Free

Welcome! This book will teach you about the Rust programming language. Rust is a systems programming language focused on three goals: safety, speed, and concurrency. It maintains these goals without having a garbage collector, making it a useful language for a number of use cases other languages aren’t good at: embedding in other languages, programs with specific space and time requirements, and writing low-level code, like device drivers and operating systems. It improves on current languages targeting this space by having a number of compile-time safety checks that produce no runtime overhead, while eliminating all data races. Rust also aims to achieve ‘zero-cost abstractions’ even though some of these abstractions feel like those of a high-level language. Even then, Rust still allows precise control like a low-level language would.

Welcome to Rust-101 Free

This is Rust-101, a small tutorial for the Rust language. It is intended to be an interactive, hands-on course: I believe the only way to really learn a language is to write code in it, so you should be coding during the course. If you have any questions that are not answered here, check out the "Additional Resources" below. In particular, the IRC channel is filled with awesome people willing to help you! I spent lots of time there ;-) I will assume some familiarity with programming, and hence not explain the basic concepts common to most languages. Instead, I will focus on what makes Rust special.

Rust by Example Free

Rust by Example (RBE) is a collection of runnable examples that illustrate various Rust concepts and standard libraries. To get even more out of these examples, don't forget to install Rust locally and check out the official docs. Additionally for the curious, you can also check out the source code for this site.

Why Rust?

While systems programming languages have greatly evolved since the introduction of C more than 40 years ago, our capacity for dumb mistakes with enormous consequences has remained unchanged, with vivid examples regularly in the news. This O'Reilly report examines Rust, a new systems programming language that combines safety and security with performance on a par with C and C++.

Learning Rust

Rust is a highly concurrent and high-performance language that focuses on safety and speed, memory management, and writing clean code. It also guarantees thread safety, and its aim is to improve the performance of existing applications. It has been backed by Mozilla to solve the critical problem of concurrency.

Beginning Rust - From Novice to Professional

Learn to program with Rust in an easy, step-by-step manner on Unix, Linux shell, macOS and the Windows command line. As you read this book, you’ll build on the knowledge you gained in previous chapters and see what Rust has to offer.

Beginning Rust starts with the basics of Rust, including how to name objects, control execution flow, and handle primitive types. You’ll see how to do arithmetic, allocate memory, use iterators, and handle input/output. Once you have mastered these core skills, you’ll work on handling errors and using the object-oriented features of Rust to build robust Rust applications in no time.

Only basic knowledge of programming is required, preferably in C or C++. To understand this book, it's enough to know what integers and floating-point numbers are, and to distinguish identifiers from string literals.

Rust Cookbook

This book will help you understand the core concepts of the Rust language, enabling you to develop efficient and high-performance applications by incorporating features such as zero-cost abstraction and better memory management. Delve into advanced-level concepts such as error handling, macros, crates, and parallelism in Rust. Toward the end of the book, learn how to create HTTP servers and web services, building a strong foundational knowledge in server-side programming and enabling to deliver solutions to build high-performance and safer production-level web applications and services using Rust.

Rust Standard Library Cookbook

Mozilla’s Rust is gaining much attention with amazing features and a powerful library. This book will take you through varied recipes to teach you how to leverage the Standard library to implement efficient solutions.

The book begins with a brief look at the basic modules of the Standard library and collections. From here, the recipes will cover packages that support file/directory handling and interaction through parsing. You will learn about packages related to advanced data structures, error handling, and networking. You will also learn to work with futures and experimental nightly features. The book also covers the most relevant external crates in Rust.

Network Programming with Rust

Rust is low-level enough to provide fine-grained control over memory while providing safety through compile-time validation. This makes it uniquely suitable for writing low-level networking applications.

This book is divided into three main parts that will take you on an exciting journey of building a fully functional web server. The book starts with a solid introduction to Rust and essential networking concepts. This will lay a foundation for, and set the tone of, the entire book. In the second part, we will take an in-depth look at using Rust for networking software. From client-server networking using sockets to IPv4/v6, DNS, TCP, UDP, you will also learn about serializing and deserializing data using serde. The book shows how to communicate with REST servers over HTTP. The final part of the book discusses asynchronous network programming using the Tokio stack. Given the importance of security for modern systems, you will see how Rust supports common primitives such as TLS and public-key cryptography.

Rust Programming by Example

Beginning with an introduction to Rust, you’ll learn the basic aspects such as its syntax, data types, functions, generics, control flows, and more. After this, you’ll jump straight into building your first project, a Tetris game. Next, you’ll build a graphical music player and work with fast, reliable networking software using Tokio, the scalable and productive asynchronous IO Rust library.

Over the course of this book, you’ll explore various features of Rust Programming including its SDL features, event loop, File I/O, and the famous GTK+ widget toolkit. Through these projects, you’ll see how well Rust performs in terms of concurrency—including parallelism, reliability, improved performance, generics, macros, and thread-safety. We’ll also cover some asynchronous and reactive programming aspects of Rust.

Rust Quick Start Guide

Get familiar with writing programs in the trending new systems programming language that brings together the powerful performance of low-level languages with the advanced features like thread safety in multi-threaded code.

Rust in Action [MEAP]

Rust in Action is a book for intermediate programmers who want to explore the world of the Rust programming language. It's intended for people who may have exhausted the free material on the web, but who still want to learn more. It's is different from other material on Rust programming because it also teaches you about systems programming along the way. You'll be able to learn more about how a CPU works, how computers keep time, what pointers are and how your network card and keyboard tell the CPU that they have input ready to read.

It’s actually unique from the point of view of systems programming books too - as almost every example works on Windows! If you are the kind of learner who enjoys worked examples, you'll enjoy reading this book.

A Gentle Introduction to Rust Free

Rust is a statically and strongly typed systems programming language. statically means that all types are known at compile-time, strongly means that these types are designed to make it harder to write incorrect programs. A successful compilation means you have a much better guarantee of correctness than with a cowboy language like C. systems means generating the best possible machine code with full control of memory use. So the uses are pretty hardcore: operating systems, device drivers and embedded systems that might not even have an operating system. However, it's actually a very pleasant language to write normal application code in as well.

The big difference from C and C++ is that Rust is safe by default; all memory accesses are checked. It is not possible to corrupt memory by accident.

Practical Machine Learning with Rust: Creating Intelligent Applications in Rust

Machine Learning in Rust has been neglected for quite some time by the community. With many disparate crates scattered through the cosmos, this book is an attempt at unifying all the information and usages that are out there and kind of shake the community into action. Data is the new frontier and Rust has to be a part of that.

After reading Practical Machine Learning with Rust, you will have a solid understanding of creating high computation libraries using Rust. Armed with the knowledge of this amazing language, you will be able to create applications that are more performant, memory safe, and less resource-heavy.

Advanced Books

The Rustonomicon Free

This book digs into all the awful details that are necessary to understand in order to write correct Unsafe Rust programs. Due to the nature of this problem, it may lead to unleashing untold horrors that shatter your psyche into a billion infinitesimal fragments of despair.

Should you wish a long and happy career of writing Rust programs, you should turn back now and forget you ever saw this book. It is not necessary. However, if you intend to write unsafe code -- or just want to dig into the guts of the language -- this book contains invaluable information.

Programming Rust

This practical book introduces systems programmers to Rust, the new and cutting-edge language. You’ll learn how Rust offers the rare and valuable combination of statically verified memory safety and low-level control—imagine C++, but without dangling pointers, null pointer dereferences, leaks, or buffer overruns.

Mastering Rust 2nd Edition

Rust is an empowering language that provides a rare combination of safety, speed, and zero-cost abstractions. Mastering Rust – Second Edition is filled with clear and simple explanations of the language features along with real-world examples, showing you how you can build robust, scalable, and reliable programs.

This second edition of the book improves upon the previous one and touches on all aspects that make Rust a great language. We have included the features from the latest Rust 2018 edition such as the new module system, the smarter compiler, helpful error messages, and the stable procedural macros. You’ll learn how Rust can be used for systems programming, network programming, and even on the web. You’ll also learn techniques such as writing memory-safe code, building idiomatic Rust libraries, writing efficient asynchronous networking code, and advanced macros. The book contains a mix of theory and hands-on tasks so you acquire the skills as well as the knowledge, and it also provides exercises to hammer the concepts in.

After reading this book, you will be able to implement Rust for your enterprise projects, write better tests and documentation, design for performance, and write idiomatic Rust code.

Rust Essentials - Second Edition

This book starts off with the argumentation of Rust's unique place in today's landscape of programming languages. Install Rust and learn how to work with its package manager Cargo. The various concepts are introduced step by step: variables, types, functions, and control structures to lay the groundwork. Then explore more structured data such as strings, arrays, and enums, and see how pattern matching works.

Throughout all this, this book lays emphasis on the unique ways of reasoning that the Rust compiler uses to produce safe code. Next look at Rust's specific way of error handling, and the overall importance of traits in Rust code. The pillar of memory safety is treated in depth as we explore the various pointer kinds. Next, see how macros can simplify code generation, and how to compose bigger projects with modules and crates. Finally, discover how we can write safe concurrent code in Rust and interface with C programs, get a view of the Rust ecosystem, and explore the use of the standard library.

Hands-On Concurrency with Rust

This book will teach you how to manage program performance on modern machines and build fast, memory-safe, and concurrent software in Rust. It starts with the fundamentals of Rust and discusses machine architecture concepts. You will be taken through ways to measure and improve the performance of Rust code systematically and how to write collections with confidence. You will learn about the Sync and Send traits applied to threads, and coordinate thread execution with locks, atomic primitives, data-parallelism, and more.

The book will show you how to efficiently embed Rust in C++ code and explore the functionalities of various crates for multithreaded applications. It explores implementations in depth. You will know how a mutex works and build several yourself. You will master radically different approaches that exist in the ecosystem for structuring and managing high-scale systems.

Hands-On Functional Programming in Rust

Functional Programming allows developers to divide programs into smaller, reusable components that ease the creation, testing, and maintenance of software as a whole. Combined with the power of Rust, you can develop robust and scalable applications that fulfill modern day software requirements. This book will help you discover all the Rust features that can be used to build software in a functional way.

We begin with a brief comparison of the functional and object-oriented approach to different problems and patterns. We then quickly look at the patterns of control flow, data the abstractions of these unique to Functional Programming. The next part covers how to create functional apps in Rust; mutability and ownership, which are exclusive to Rust, are also discussed. Pure functions are examined next and you'll master closures, their various types, and currying. We also look at implementing concurrency through functional design principles and metaprogramming using macros. Finally, we look at best practices for debugging and optimization.

By the end of the book, you will be familiar with the functional approach of programming and will be able to use these techniques on a daily basis.

Rust High Performance

At times, it is difficult to get the best performance out of Rust. This book teaches you to optimize the speed of your Rust code to the level of languages such as C/C++. You'll understand and fix common pitfalls, learn how to improve your productivity by using metaprogramming, and speed up your code by concurrently executing parts of it safely and easily. You will master the features of the language which will make you stand out and use them to really improve the efficiency of your algorithms

The book begins with a gentle introduction to help you identify bottlenecks when programming in Rust. We highlight common performance pitfalls, along with strategies to detect and resolve these issues early. We move on to mastering Rust's type system, which will enable us to create impressive optimizations in both performance and safety at compile time. You will then learn how to effectively manage memory in Rust, mastering the borrow checker. We move on to measuring performance and you will see how this affects the way you write code. Moving ahead, you will perform metaprogramming in Rust to boost the performance of your code and your productivity. You will finally learn parallel programming in Rust, which enables efficient and faster execution by using multithreading and asynchronous programming.

Zero To Production In Rust

If you want to learn how to use Rust for backend development, this is the place.

Rust's adoption is at an all-time high: more and more companies are trying it out and hiring for it.
If you are interested in building APIs with Rust, Zero To Production is the ideal starting point for your Rust journey.
You will learn by doing: we will start from scratch and build together, step by step, a fully functional email newsletter backend API.

You'll learn how to:

• Navigate and leverage Rust's crates ecosystem
• Structure your application to make it modular and extensible
• Write tests, from single units to full-blown integration tests
• Model your domain using the type system to enforce invariants
• Collect logs, traces and metrics to observe the state of your application
• Set up a robust continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline for your Rust projects

Programming WebAssembly with Rust

WebAssembly is more than just a revolutionary new technology. It’s reshaping how we build applications for the web and beyond. Where technologies like ActiveX and Flash have failed, you can now write code in whatever language you prefer and compile to WebAssembly for fast, type-safe code that runs in the browser, on mobile devices, embedded devices, and more. Combining WebAssembly’s portable, high-performance modules with Rust’s safety and power is a perfect development combination.

Learn how WebAssembly’s stack machine architecture works, install low-level wasm tools, and discover the dark art of writing raw wast code. Build on that foundation and learn how to compile WebAssembly modules from Rust by implementing the logic for a checkers game. Create wasm modules in Rust to interoperate with JavaScript in many compelling ways. Apply your new skills to the world of non-web hosts, and create everything from an app running on a Raspberry Pi that controls a lighting system, to a fully-functioning online multiplayer game engine where developers upload their own arena-bound WebAssembly combat modules.

Get started with WebAssembly today, and change the way you think about the web.

Step Ahead with Rust: Systems Programming in Rust

From basic programming patterns to a peek under the hood of the language, Step Ahead with Rust aims to help you move from writing programs to building software in Rust. This book will show you the most important features of the Rust language, including cargo, type system, iterators and more. By the end of this book, you should be familiar with far more of them, and ready to tackle the rest of advanced topics.

As you progress through the book, we recommend taking the time to experiment with what is presented in its pages. This book is all about the practical application of Rust, so applying it in practice is expected. The book covers: Cargo, Rust Type System, Iterators, Macros, Ownership, Borrowing and Lifetimes, Unsafe Patterns, Concurrency. A Step Ahead with Rust reader is expected to be a moderately experienced developer looking to improve their Rust development skills.

Hands-On Microservices with Rust 2018: How To Build Scalable and Reliable RESTful Microservices will be published in April 2019

Microservice architecture is sweeping the world as the de facto pattern to build web-based applications. Rust is a language particularly well suited to building microservices. It is a new system programming language that offers a practical and safe alternative to C.

This book describes web development using the Rust programming language and will get you up and running with modern web frameworks and crates with examples of RESTful microservices creation. You will deep dive into Reactive programming, asynchronous programming and split our web application into a set of concurrent actors. The book provides several highly accurate HTTP-handling examples with manageable memory allocations. You will be walked through stateless high-performance microservices which are ideally suitable for computation or caching tasks and get to stateful microservices which are filled with persistent data and database interactions. As we move along, you will learn to use Rust macros to describe business or protocol entities of our application and compile them into native structs which will be performed at full speed with the help of the server's CPU.

Finally, you will be taken through examples of how to test and debug microservices and pack them to a tiny monolithic binary or put it into a container and deploy it to modern cloud platforms such as AWS.

The Little Book of Rust Macros Free (this is a work in progress)

This book is an attempt to distil the Rust community's collective knowledge of Rust macros. The book will introduce Rust's Macro-By-Example system: macro_rules!. Rather than trying to cover it based on practical examples, it will instead attempt to give you a complete and thorough explanation of how the system works. As such, this is intended for people who just want the system as a whole explained, rather than be guided through it.

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Rust

The book begins with an introduction to Rust data structures and algorithms, while also covering essential language constructs. You will learn how to store data using linked lists, arrays, stacks, and queues. You will also learn how to implement sorting and searching algorithms. You will learn how to attain high performance by implementing algorithms to string data types and implement hash structures in algorithm design. The book will examine algorithm analysis, including Brute Force algorithms, Greedy algorithms, Divide and Conquer algorithms, Dynamic Programming, and Backtracking.

By the end of the book, you will have learned how to build components that are easy to understand, debug, and use in different applications.

The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide: Design, develop, and deploy effective software systems using the advanced constructs of Rust

Rust is a powerful language with a rare combination of safety, speed, and zero-cost abstractions. This Learning Path is filled with clear and simple explanations of its features along with real-world examples, demonstrating how you can build robust, scalable, and reliable programs. You'll get started with an introduction to Rust data structures, algorithms, and essential language constructs. Next, you will understand how to store data using linked lists, arrays, stacks, and queues. You'll also learn to implement sorting and searching algorithms, such as Brute Force algorithms, Greedy algorithms, Dynamic Programming, and Backtracking. As you progress, you'll pick up on using Rust for systems programming, network programming, and the web. You'll then move on to discover a variety of techniques, right from writing memory-safe code, to building idiomatic Rust libraries, and even advanced macros. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be able to implement Rust for enterprise projects, writing better tests and documentation, designing for performance, and creating idiomatic Rust code.

This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products:

• Mastering Rust - Second Edition by Rahul Sharma and Vesa Kaihlavirta
• Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Rust by Claus Matzinger

Creative Projects for Rust Programmers

A practical guide to understanding the latest features of the Rust programming language, useful libraries, and frameworks that will help you design and develop interesting projects

Learn:

• Access TOML, JSON, and XML files and SQLite, PostgreSQL, and Redis databases
• Develop a RESTful web service using JSON payloads
• Create a web application using HTML templates and JavaScript and a frontend web application or web game using WebAssembly
• Build desktop 2D games
• Develop an interpreter and a compiler for a programming language
• Create a machine language emulator
• Extend the Linux Kernel with loadable modules

Resources

Learn Rust with examples

The Rust Programming Language

Are We Learning Yet?: List of resources for machine learning in Rust

Are We Web Yet?: List of resources for web development in Rust

Contributing

Your contributions are always welcome, just follow the rules!

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.