Welcome

Welcome to "100 Exercises To Learn Rust"!

This course will teach you Rust's core concepts, one exercise at a time.
You'll learn about Rust's syntax, its type system, its standard library, and its ecosystem.

We don't assume any prior knowledge of Rust, but we assume you know at least another programming language. We also don't assume any prior knowledge of systems programming or memory management. Those topics will be covered in the course.

In other words, we'll be starting from scratch!
You'll build up your Rust knowledge in small, manageable steps. By the end of the course, you will have solved ~100 exercises, enough to feel comfortable working on small to medium-sized Rust projects.

Methodology

This course is based on the "learn by doing" principle.
It has been designed to be interactive and hands-on.

Mainmatter developed this course to be delivered in a classroom setting, over 4 days: each attendee advances through the lessons at their own pace, with an experienced instructor providing guidance, answering questions and diving deeper into the topics as needed.
You can sign up for the next tutored session on our website. If you'd like to organise a private session for your company, please get in touch.

You can also take the courses on your own, but we recommend you find a friend or a mentor to help you along the way should you get stuck. You can find solutions for all exercises in the solutions branch of the GitHub repository.

Formats

You can go through the course material in the browser or download it as a PDF file, for offline reading.
If you prefer to have the course material printed out, buy a paperback copy on Amazon.

Structure

On the left side of the screen, you can see that the course is divided into sections. Each section introduces a new concept or feature of the Rust language.
To verify your understanding, each section is paired with an exercise that you need to solve.

You can find the exercises in the companion GitHub repository.
Before starting the course, make sure to clone the repository to your local machine:

# If you have an SSH key set up with GitHub
git clone git@github.com:mainmatter/100-exercises-to-learn-rust.git
# Otherwise, use the HTTPS URL:
#   https://github.com/mainmatter/100-exercises-to-learn-rust.git

We also recommend you work on a branch, so you can easily track your progress and pull in updates from the main repository, if needed:

cd 100-exercises-to-learn-rust
git checkout -b my-solutions

All exercises are located in the exercises folder. Each exercise is structured as a Rust package. The package contains the exercise itself, instructions on what to do (in src/lib.rs), and a test suite to automatically verify your solution.

Tools

To work through this course, you'll need:

  • Rust). If rustup is already installed on your system, run rustup update (or another appropriate command depending on how you installed Rust on your system) to ensure you're running on the latest stable version.
  • (Optional but recommended) An IDE with Rust autocompletion support. We recommend one of the following:

To verify your solutions, we've also provided a tool to guide you through the course. It is the wr CLI (short for "workshop runner"). Install it with:

cargo install --locked workshop-runner

In a new terminal, navigate back to the top-level folder of the repository. Run the wr command to start the course:

wr

wr will verify the solution to the current exercise.
Don't move on to the next section until you've solved the exercise for the current one.

We recommend committing your solutions to Git as you progress through the course, so you can easily track your progress and "restart" from a known point if needed.

Enjoy the course!

Author

This course was written by Luca Palmieri, Principal Engineering Consultant at Mainmatter.
Luca has been working with Rust since 2018, initially at TrueLayer and then at AWS.
Luca is the author of "Zero to Production in Rust", the go-to resource for learning how to build backend applications in Rust.
He is also the author and maintainer of a variety of open-source Rust projects, including cargo-chef, Pavex and wiremock.

Exercise

The exercise for this section is located in 01_intro/00_welcome