The Top Programming Books for Learning Rust

In this article we will be looking at the best books you can buy to help you learn the basics of Rust Systems Development.

Rust is an incredibly fast systems programming language that is used by a very wide range of large organizations such as mozilla (the original creators of the language), Atlassian, Dropbox and npm.

Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development

Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development (1st Edition) is a fantastic resource for those of you willing to pick up the relatively new language. The book explains the complexities of the language and how you can ensure your programs are free from things such as null pointer dereferences, double frees, dangling pointers and other such bugs.

The authors; Jim Blandy and Jason Orendorff are both experienced systems programmers and are both very qualified to teach you the basics of the Rust programming language.

What it Covers

• How Rust represents values in memory (with diagrams)
• Complete explanations of ownership, moves, borrows, and lifetimes
• Cargo, rustdoc, unit tests and how to publish your code on crates.io, Rust’s public package repository
• High-level features like generic code, closures, collections and iterators that make Rust productive and flexible
• Concurrency in Rust: threads, mutexes, channels, and atomics, all much safer to use than in C or C++
• Unsafe code, and how to preserve the integrity of ordinary code that uses it.

Mastering Rust

Mastering Rust by Vesa Kaihlavirta is a new book which teaches you concepts such as concurrent programming and other intermediate to advanced programming concepts. It does this by using a series of real-world examples and explanations and showing you how to create scalable and reliable programs for your organization.

What it Covers

• Implement unit testing patterns with the standard Rust tools
• Get to know the different philosophies of error handling and how to use them wisely
• Appreciate Rust’s ability to solve memory allocation problems safely without garbage collection
• Get to know how concurrency works in Rust and use concurrency primitives such as threads and message passing
• Use syntax extensions and write your own
• Create a Web application with Rocket
• Use Diesel to build safe database abstractions

FullStack Rust: The Complete Guide to Building Apps with the Rust Programming Language and Friends

Fullstack Rust by Andy Weiss is a new book that was sent to me for review. I'm currently around halfway through the book and so far it has been great in terms of the topics it covers and the way in which it presents the material.

The book is still currently under construction as it stands, but from the initial material it looks more than worthy of a place on our list if you are looking to get into Rust!

What it Covers

• Performance in Rust
• The Strong, static, expressive type system
• Fearless concurrency
• Modern Generics
• Memory Safety

Buy Now: Fullstack Rust: The Complete Guide to Building Apps with the Rust Programming Language and Friends

Conclusion

This list is ultimately still growing. Rust is a fairly new language and finding decent books that teach you the basics can be a bit of a struggle. As the language picks up in popularity we should hopefully see the number of technical books and references growing quickly. If you see any new books that you believe should be on the list then please let me know in the comments section below.