Afterword
Hopefully the advice, suggestions, and information in this book will help you become a fluent, productive Rust programmer. As the Preface describes, this book is intended to cover the second step in this process, after you’ve learned the basics from a core Rust reference book. But there are more steps you can take and directions to explore:
- Async Rust is not covered in this book but is likely to be needed for efficient, concurrent
server-side applications. The online documentation provides an
introduction to
async, and the forthcoming Async Rust by Maxwell Flitton and Caroline Morton (O'Reilly, 2024) may also help. - Moving in the other direction, bare-metal Rust might align with your interests and requirements. This goes
beyond the introduction to
no_stdin Item 33 to a world where there's no operating system and no allocation. The bare-metal Rust section of the Comprehensive Rust online course provides a good introduction here. - Regardless of whether your interests are low-level or high-level, the
crates.ioecosystem of third-party, open source crates is worth exploring—and contributing to. Curated summaries like blessed.rs or lib.rs can help navigate the huge number of possibilities. - Rust discussion forums such as the Rust language forum or Reddit's r/rust can provide help—and include a searchable index of questions that have been asked (and answered!) previously.
- If you find yourself relying on an existing library that's not written in Rust (as per Item 34), you could rewrite it in Rust (RiiR). But don't underestimate the effort required to reproduce a battle-tested, mature codebase.
- As you become more skilled in Rust, Jon Gjengset's Rust for Rustaceans (No Starch, 2022) is an essential reference for more advanced aspects of Rust.
Good luck!
