Rustlings VS rust-koans

Not a book per se, but rustlings is quite fun to do. Linky

And after each chapter, do the Rustlings exercises for it.

Rustlings — a collection of small exercises you can run through to improve your Rust. Consider this if you prefer a more practical approach to learning, rather than reading the book,

> Suppose I wanted to try learning Rust again; is there a resource for someone with a lot of (hobbyist) programming experience, and experience with low level languages and memory management (e.g. C), but not complicated low-level languages, like C++?

The official Rust book is targeted at novices with some programming experience. There's also Rustlings https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings for a more practical approach.

> When I tried to work with Rust a few years ago I found it utterly impenetrable. I just had no idea what the borrow checker was doing, did not understand what the error messages meant, and honestly couldn't even understand the documentation or the tutorials on the subject

The compiler diagnostics have improved a lot over time. It's quite possible that some of the examples you have in mind return better error messages.

> in Rust it's always been a nightmare for me. I just really don't grok the "lifetime" concept at all, it feels like I'm trying to learn academic computer science instead of a programming language.

Academic computer science calls lifetimes "regions", which is perhaps a clearer term. It's a fairly clean extension of the notion of scope that you'd also find in languages like C or Zig. It's really not that complex, even though the Rust community sometimes finds it difficult to convey the right intuitions.

Rustlings helps a lot with that. Also LazyRen has worked through them all and has additional explanations of what is needed for each and why.

10. Rustlings is a git project with small exercises to learn Rust. I absolutely loved this resource as it covered each topic in "the book" and was challenging at times. I worked through the whole set of exercises and felt quite accomplished every time I got through a tough one. My favorite was figuring out how to write a function to find the factorial of a number in a single line using iterators.

Rust

* https://github.com/crazymykl/rust-koans