HandsOnRust VS too-many-lists

I'm working my way through the HandsOnRust book that guides you through creating a simple roguelike using Rust and Legion ECS. It's a really enjoyable experience so far, and I'm looking towards trying out Bevy ECS afterwards to compare the two.

https://github.com/thebracket/HandsOnRust

But if you really want to follow more things then hands on rust and zero to production are two good quality books for learning rust through game dev and web development respectively. But I would still urge you to try a few things by yourself first.

Started learning rust a while ago but I needed something to walk me through the features while building something useful. I discovered Hands On Rust and have learned more in 3 hours of building flappy bird clones than in two weeks of experimenting with tutorials.

There is Zero To Production In Rust which goes through building a webserver in rust from the ground up. Or Hands on rust for learning rust by building a game.

Some (optionally) in print: * Rust in Action * Programming Rust * Hands-On Rust * Rust for Rustaceans

Game development though might be a harder place to start. You may find other more basic areas easier to get going. Though there is a good book on learning rust with game dev Hands on Rust that you might find enough.

Other books/resources you might find helpful - Rust by example - a good compliment to The Book that shows concepts with examples. Though does not explain things as much. - Zero To Production In Rust - a look at webservers and taking them to production (still being written though) - Hands on rust - a look at introducing rust with gamedev. - Easy rust - Many more listed here

This is a beginner question. I'm following Hands-On Rust to build simple games. One thing that isn't clear to me so far is how `bracket-lib` actually load the fonts and image of different characters from a single PNG file. Is the PNG file segmented in certain pixel values so that `bracket-lib` could access each square of the image like an array? Does this mean that this PNG file must be always designed in specific ways? Thanks for helping!

One year ago, I released the first beta for Hands-on Rust. What a wild and awesome ride it has been! The book has been on the publisher's best sellers list for 50 of the last 52 weeks, since the print edition came out it's been in Amazon's top 10-20 for "C Language" and sometimes "Game Development" most of the time. I had a "good grief, am I famous?" moment when a relative (who works for one of the huge American social media companies) sent me a pic showing Hands-on Rust sitting on his boss's desk.

You seem to have a preset opinion, and I'm not sure you are interested in re-evaluating it. So this is not written to change your mind.

I've developed production code in C, C++, Rust, and several other languages. And while like pretty much everything, there are situations where it's not a good fit, I find that the solutions tend to be the most robust and require the least post release debugging in Rust. That's my personal experience. It's not hard data. And yes occasionally it's annoying to please the compiler, and if there were no trait constraints or borrow rules, those instances would be easier. But way more often in my experience the compiler complained because my initial solution had problems I didn't realize before. So for me, these situations have been about going from building it the way I wanted to -> compiler tells me I didn't consider an edge case -> changing the implementation and or design to account for that edge case. Also using one example, where is Rust is notoriously hard and or un-ergonomic to use, and dismissing the entire language seems premature to me. For those that insist on learning Rust by implementing a linked list there is https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/.

Advent of Code was okay until I encounterd a problem that required a graph, tree or linked list to solve, where I hit a wall. Most coding exercises are similar--those requiring arrays and hashmaps and sets are okay, but complex data structures are a PITA. (There is an online course dedicated to linked lists in Rust but I couldn't grok it either). IMO you should simply skip problems that you can't solve with your current knowledge level and move on.

I feel obligated to point to the original cannon literature: https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

I started learning Rust and like how the compiler is fussy about things. My plan was to implement the data structures I knew, but I got stuck at the singly linked list's remove() method. I've read the book as well, but I have no clue how to simplify this further:

My impression from the article is that Zig provides several different hashtables and not all of them are broken in this way.

This reminds me of Aria's comment in her Rust tutorial https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/ about failing to kill LinkedList. One philosophy (and the one Rust chose) for a stdlib is that this is only where things should live when they're so commonly needed that essentially everybody needs them either directly or to talk about. So, HashTable is needed by so much otherwise unrelated software that qualifies, BloomFilter, while it's real useful for some people, not so much. Aria cleaned out Rust's set of standard library containers before Rust 1.0, trying to keep only those most people would need. LinkedList isn't a good general purpose data structure, but, it was too popular and Aria was not able to remove it.

Having multiple hash tables feels like a win (they're optimized for different purposes) but may cost too much in terms of the necessary testing to ensure they all hit the quality you want.

> Cyclic references can be dealt with runtime safety checks too - like Rc and Weak.

Indeed. Starting out with code sprinkled with Rc, Weak, RefCell, etc is perfectly fine and performance will probably not be worse than in any other safe languages. And if you do this, Rust is pretty close to those languages in ease of use for what are otherwise complex topics in Rust.

A good reference for different approaches is Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

Second, once you've finished something introductory like The Book, read Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists. It really helped me to understand what ownership and borrowing actually mean in practical terms. If you don't mind paying for learning materials, a lot of people recommend Programming Rust, Second Edition by Blandy, Orendorff, and Tindall as either a complement, follow-up, or alternative to The Book.

Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists which highlights a lot of the differences with how you need to structure your code in Rust compared to other languages.