a big part of the early Rust community comes from Ruby, so Rust as an entry to systems programming is really common. Mozilla's IRC server has a #rust-beginners

a big part of the early Rust community comes from Ruby, so Rust as an entry to systems programming is really common. Mozilla's IRC server has a #rust-beginners channel that is like, overwhelmingly helpful. Go and ask stupid questions. "The Rust Programming Language" is good: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/second-edition/ https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/second-edition/ Knowing the difference between the stack and the heap, and having a picture of it in your head and understanding which variables go where, and what happens to the stack when calling and returning from functions, is pretty important. (Python wouldn't give you this intuition, although programming in something like Java might.) I half-assed learned to code in C++ for scientific purposes. Later I got deeper into Rust, and it's made me a better, safer C++ programmer when I run into C++ code.