Justin’s Reviews > The Rust Programming Language > Status Update

I'm finding it helpful to write the code from short term memory. Once I run the code and the errors happen I know where to pay attention. Using that the book is now advancing at an easy pace. Cargo is a very intuitive, and powerful program. Rust has an excellent mechanism for keeping code dependencies uniform and simple to share.

Finally, a recap chapter! The test chapter was very straightforward, but easy. How motivating to make a real terminal app.

The material is very difficult here for how abstract it is. Generics represent any type, but can be constrained. Trait bounds specify behavior regardless of generic parameters or not and can specify default values. That's fine, but the combination of both and lifetimes by itself make this the hardest chapter so far.

We are admonished to practice and make predictions in advance of code review.

The material is building on previous work with enums and match expressions. Match expressions seem very useful for avoiding redundant code and ensuring every case is covered.

Happily, I find there are example problems to work out. I assumed that they would either be in the end of chapters or not be. The problems are just not as formally structured as most textbooks.

Indeed, enums and match expressions seem to be a remarkably useful feature of Rust. Because enums are exhaustive code changes to a custom type, like some enums, allow the compiler to do much of the hard work of tracking where code changes are needed.

Here is my first complaint of the book. There are some exercises in the book, but it's not consistent. The exercises don't have canonical solutions provided in the book, I'm not aware of a Github reference to such code, and most chapters don't have challenging exercises.

I love this book! It so far has no GUI based instructions so there are no problems or deviations across OSs unfortunately unlike the other books int he Humble Bundle. It has a moderate pace, and clear instructions as well.

I'm definitely drinking the cool aid. I hope Rust gradually replaces languages that are inferior in syntax, documentation, and community like C++.

It's JavaScript programmer approved.