5 things I wish I knew before learning Rust

Ready to dive into Rust programming? Don't start without watching this video! In today's guide, I share 5 crucial insights I wish I had before embarking on my Rust journey. Whether you're a beginner or seasoned developer, these tips will save you time and frustration.

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[fcolecumberri]

The best way to love Rust is to know C++ deep enough to love it and wish it's death at the same time.

[LeviNotik]

Yes, all of the concepts you mentioned here are obviously relevant and useful for learning Rust. Certainly knowing about the memory model, the stack vs the heap, etc. However, and I mention this mostly as a note to newcomers who may be discouraged by the sheer number of things mentioned here from learning Rust, that I think it's a mistake to refer to all of this as things you wished you knew "before learning Rust." You can learn many of these things along the way and sharpen your understanding as you go. I wouldn't view everything mentioned here as some hard prerequisite. Often times, when we learn new things, we have a hindsight bias problem where, after having learned all the things, we look back and say "gee I wish I had known these things before diving into or learning X"...but maybe it was totally fine to have learned these things by way of learning X. Sometimes it is actually preferable since learning X provides the context and motivation. Just my 2c

[fluxx]

C++ was my favourite language for a very long time. I got introduced to Rust through a project at work. After a few pages of the Rust Book, I immediately noticed that I really like Rust and that for me it is C++, just improved with all the things that annoy me about C++. I really hope that we will see more and more Rust in the future and that the language will continue to develop. I don't have much experience with Rust yet, but it has already replaced C++ as my favorite language 😅

[Mempler]

I went from C++ to Rust and suddenly, C++ made so much more sense.

Its insane how Rust rewires your brain.

[justsomeguy]

I don't think you mentioned it, but I started with the "Programming Rust" book. It's incredibly well-written, and explains Rust concepts in relation to C, so it explains why the concept is an issue in C and is fixed in Rust. This gives you a great understanding of why things are the way they are in Rust without needing to struggle through learning C to appreciate it.

[RemizZ]

Having only ever written PHP and JS, I definitely feel the mountain of concepts and terminology I've never heard of or had to worry about. It's still fun to just dive in and try things just because the compiler error messages are so insanely good. I will probably never be a "proper" programmer (missing far too much math knowledge sadly), but for what I want to do with it, I'll manage.

[apffer]

Jeremy Chone is the best Rust resource in YouTube for backend dev, after you get the foundation knowledge right from the Rust Book and Rust by Example.

[hermand]

I'm not a developer by trade, though I do write code professionally in my DevOps/Sysadmin'y work - mostly the MS stack on C#/PowerShell etc. A few years ago I sat down and learnt C to a reasonable standard, it was a tough process but in learning Rust I've really appreciated the grounding it's given me. So much of what people hate about Rust just hasn't bothered me, because it conceptually makes sense. I don't find myself wrestling with the dreaded borrow checker (mostly..) and so on. But, I think had I gone from C# with all its cuddly help and GC I would have absolutely hated Rust. I'm now writing lots of embedded code in Rust and just loving the journey

[tiagocerqueira]

Shout out to The Cherno! Helped me to learn intermediate/advanced C++.

[thebsv]

Excellent advice, what are some good resources to learn multithreading, parallelism and concurrency concepts?

[JeremyChone]

Great video, and thanks for the mention!

[luambo]

what do you think of the "copying while trying to understand" method of learning?
people often say that it's good to always fully understand and build things on your own, but I've come to a conclusion that withou a repertoire, we simply can't build things.

[FastMellow]

The funny thing is about learning Rust is how you start to appreciate languages like C# even more that do a lot of these concepts for you.
We still code mostly in C#, but the low level stuff (mostly drivers and interfacing with weird hardware) we use Rust...

[wanglewis]

May I ask how long it took you to learn through this journey?

[michaelhoffmann]

Good insight. As someone who got his start in the dark ages of C, talk of memory management, pointers, etc, holds no fear, if anything leaves me slightly smug. Glad I learned them when I still needed them, even though I then got shifted into the "glory" of managed languages - and got lazy. Java, C#, Python, Go...

But you put your finger on major issues: finding the use case and dealing with the drop in productivity. At work, you may have the former, but the Powers That Be may not allow you the latter. Learning it in your own time, you will have the latter, but you need that spark of an idea for a long-term personal project. I've been working on an iOS app in my spare time for years. It's become more of a learning platform to teach me new concepts rather than "Im going to build the new killer app". Rust support in iOS is still somewhat new, but maybe converting my code to Rust is the way to go.

[dude]

First video of these I wish I knew videos that was actually super useful. Also are you using the eye contact AI program?

[LiamDennehy]

Two of the best learning resources for Rust are Let's Get Rusty, and No Boilerplate.

[techbytefrontier]

As a person who took the first classes in programming using C i can say, Rust is awesome. I'm really enjoying, bright future.

[Shaheer-xsos]

I love Rust... It's my favorite language now, kicking down Typescript...

[anthonygayflor]

This is why I love rust, I dropped out of school half way in and some cs concepts are fuzzy for me. (Binary, Sogned/unsigned ints, buffers, etc) have come up a lot in the beginning of me learning I g rust and I honestly love it. It’s like going back to school without have to pay for it or dread learning.

I made it thru college off YouTube anyways, this is no different.