How to Learn Rust

Today I'm going to talk about some strange recommendations I have on how to learn Rust.

Thanks very much to today's sponsor RazorSecure.

🖊️ Corrections are in the pinned ERRATA comment.

🙏🏻 CREDITS & PROMO
My name is Tris Oaten and I produce fast, technical videos.

👏🏻 Special thanks to my patreon sponsor:
- JC Andrever-Wright
And to all my patrons!

[NoBoilerplate]

ERRATA

- I'VE BEEN INFORMED RAZORSECURE ARE HIRING INTERNATIONALLY - THEIR WEBSITE IS WRONG! APPLY AWAY!
- read the rust book offline with `rustup docs --book`

[sasukesarutobi]

For anyone wondering what a monad is: it's just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. Pretty straightforward, really.

[chrissaltmarsh]

Being ancient (73) I am enjoying Rust. This is because I started with assmbler and C when hitting the hardware, and having learnt about foot damage I understand the ideas that Rust brings. Perhaps the way to learn the benefits of Rust is to try the job in C, fall down the hole, and then harness Rust.
(Although I am fond of C, and modern compute machines can do all the splendid compilation and build checks that a PDP-11 would take a week)

[adamdggg]

I am so glad you mentioned cloning over and over because I preach it to others haha. The single most helpful thing I did for learning rust is NOT to borrow. Lots of cloning, returning objects over and over. It got me used to data lifetimes and moves. By making it redundant I understood it. Then borrows felt like a natural optimization. It created a gentle learning curve. I mentor a lot of junior devs and the dopamine hit of getting something that works is ESSENTIAL for motivating newbies hahah.

[ChronosWS]

Your experience with feelings about lifetimes exactly maps to mine. At first it was annoying. Now I see them as a powerful tool that I absolutely miss in other languages.

[enque]

How to learn the benefits of Rust: First attain 15 years of working experience in C, C++, asm, JS and Python. Do all sorts of projects in them, across all sorts of scales. See what sorts of problems plague each of them. And then go to Rust. You'll now have motivation to breeze through the initial vertical climb, to the lands of joy beyond.

[IsohFM]

I just started learning Rust 2 days ago because of you. So this timing could not have been better! Keep up the great work :)

[Magnogen]

Lurker here, I've been learning rust for about a week now and I've gotten further with it than I ever have with any other language. I came from JavaScript, and if anyone is on the edge of deciding whether or not to learn it, I wholeheartedly agree that you should definitely give it a go. This video is 100% right

[skeetskeet]

Glad to have a video I can send to everyone I know who is learning Rust, awesome content!

[minecraft]

This Video had my brain fried. The sentence "failing a test first, then learning better" is so aligned with my own experience you couldnt imagine. Also you really have to take the test, when just looking at old exams it does not has the same effect. My mind was blown.

Thanks again for your content.

[dragon_pi]

this is a pretty good way of learning it! i especially like the re-taking test comparison: when i learned rust, i look up the very basic syntax, then i tried (and obviously failed, as expected) to write a medium sized project. In that way i also learned what to do better next time. when I *really* learned afterwards (aka reading the rust book, as one does) and made stuff that actually worked, the realization "ahh, thats how you do it, now i know what i did wrong" was amazing! this early designed-to-fail project helped me get a feeling for what i needed to learn

[caerphoto]

I find the difficulty of lifetimes to be analogous to the difficulty of Rust as a whole: it forces you to think about things up front that you can, in other languages, either ignore entirely (Python, JavaScript, and sometimes only up to a point), or spend endless painful hours debugging under higher technical debt pressure later on (C, C++).

[theroboman]

9:17 A little extension to this part: Use references in function parameters. There are other places where using references can mess you up, but in function parameters that can't really happen. You don't need to reference number types though, passing a reference is just as or more expensive than passing the thing itself.

[arijanj]

This is a beautiful video. I tried learning Rust but also gave up at lifetimes. Then I got into Haskell for entirely unrelated reasons and I noticed how many similarities they shared. Now I know neither of them, but hopefully I get a little better in the future.

[malteneuss]

Coming from Haskell to Rust i appreciate how nice the ergonomics of tooling and how large the ecosystem already is. Every important library is sufficiently documented, the compiler is so quick and helpful, for every problem there seems to exist a library you can build upon, and you can prototype quickly with lots of copy and clone but the code is still frickin fast.

[tentaklaus]

Been here a while and while I code for work in a range of languages I'm enjoying being inspired by you to keep delving back in to Rust. Great to see the channel growing and you continuing to be the Great Brit we all knew you were!

[antoneriksson]

Thank you for Side Quest #2, I had completely missed this resource and it has been very illuminating so far! You videos are what inspired me to learn rust, keep it up!

[aakura]

I didn't knew "test to learn" is a term someone defined until now. I always do this and helped me to learn many things every efficiently although there are some disadvantages. I thought this process is only my thing until now. Will read the book, thanks for recommendation.

[Olegitskillz]

Ive been trying to learn Rust for a while now and every time I get discouraged and stop for a bit I see one of your videos and it inspires me to keep going. Thank you!

[NicMcPhee]

Thanks for another excellent video. I’ve also found Rustlings to be pretty much best-in-class for that sort of learning tool, but didn’t know about the Brown edition of The Book and am looking forward to checking that out.