Mastering Rust

Introduction to Rust

• Overview of Rust and its core principles
• Rust’s philosophy, safety, and performance goals
• History and motivation behind the language
• Rust’s open-source community and ecosystem
• Using the Rust Playground for experimentation

Environment Setup and Tools

• Installing Rust on macOS, Windows, and Linux
• Using Homebrew and platform-specific installers
• Setting up Visual Studio Code with extensions
• Using Rust Rover and other IDEs
• Debugging Rust applications in VSCode
• Integrating GitHub Copilot into workflows

Getting Started with Rust Projects

• Creating and managing a new Rust project
• Understanding the main function structure
• Printing output to the console
• Writing and managing comments

Cargo and Project Management

• Understanding the purpose of Cargo
• Running, building, and releasing projects
• Installing and managing third-party crates with Cargo

Rust Fundamentals

• Working with scalar types and basic data
• Declaring constants and variables
• Using immutable and mutable variables
• Writing control flow with if, loop, and while
• Defining functions and passing parameters
• Understanding return types and closures

Modules and Code Organization

• Importing standard and third-party modules
• Defining and importing custom modules
• Using built-in macros for formatting and logic
• Common macros like println, format, assert, and vec

Memory Management and Ownership

• Problems with manual and garbage-collected memory models
• Understanding Rust’s ownership system
• Using references and understanding borrowing
• Working with lifetimes in functions and structs

Strings and Collections

• Understanding string slices and string objects
• Converting between string types
• Parsing numbers from strings and trimming
• Interpolating strings for output

Tuples and Structs

• Defining and using tuples with heterogeneous data
• Accessing and destructuring tuple values
• Creating and updating struct instances
• Field shorthand, tuple structs, and unit-like structs
• Managing ownership within structs
• Implementing functions and methods on structs
• Using constructor patterns

Enums and Pattern Matching

• Defining enums and working with variants
• Adding methods to enums
• Using enums in pattern matching
• Understanding Result and Option enums
• Comparing enums and structs in data design

Working with Vectors and Collections

• Creating and mutating vectors
• Accessing and slicing vector elements
• Calculating vector length and capacity
• Streaming over elements with iterators
• Using arrays, slices, hash maps, and hash sets

Traits and Generics

• Understanding traits as interfaces
• Defining and implementing traits
• Using default trait methods
• Passing traits as parameters and return types
• Applying trait bounds in generic code
• Working with multiple generics and where clauses

Advanced Pattern Matching

• Using match, if let, and while let expressions
• Destructuring complex structs and tuples
• Applying pattern matching to functions and ownership
• Understanding refutable and irrefutable patterns

Concurrency and Asynchronous Programming

• Writing concurrent code with threads
• Using Mutex, RwLock, and Arc for synchronization
• Message passing using channels
• Understanding Sync and Send traits
• Writing asynchronous code with async and await
• Working with futures and non-blocking patterns

Unsafe Rust and System Access

• Understanding the purpose of unsafe Rust
• Working with raw pointers and unsafe functions
• Using unsafe blocks responsibly
• Creating safe abstractions over unsafe logic
• Defining and using unsafe traits

Macros and Metaprogramming

• Defining macros with macro_rules
• Using pattern matching in macros
• Expanding and invoking custom macros for automation

Testing and Documentation

• Writing unit tests with standard test attributes
• Organizing and running tests in modules
• Using assert macros for validation
• Creating documentation with Rustdoc
• Adding documentation comments
• Generating and linking external documentation