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I'm learning Rust as well; in my opinion, starting with small guided projects is the most stimulating and incremental approach, although unfortunately, I find t

I'm learning Rust as well; in my opinion, starting with small guided projects is the most stimulating and incremental approach, although unfortunately, I find that starting practicing Rust - differently from other languages - requires "having read the whole reference". The resources I've reviewed are: - Rustlings: I personally don't like the project; it's exercises for the sake of exercising, which may be good or not, depending on the person/approach. - Ferrous systems exercises (set of mini projects): very small and simple, but interesting to work on. I think they're a very good resource to try immediately after reading the book. - Rust Programming By Example (book): if one finds one or more projects interesting to work on, this is a very fun book. it's "not-perfectly-produced" though, if you know what I mean. - Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms in Rust (udemy): even if one doesn't like algorithms, I think working with data structures implicity develops an understanding of "getting the head into Rust". - Build your own Jira with Rust (https://github.com/LukeMathWalker/build-your-own-jira-with-rust https://github.com/LukeMathWalker/build-your-own-jira-with-r...): An exercise-based approach to practice; probably a good alternative to the previous resource, for those who really don't want to work with A./D.S.. - Talent Plan (https://github.com/pingcap/talent-plan https://github.com/pingcap/talent-plan): like the previous, but more technical. Have fun :-)

gwbas1c 6y ago
> I find that starting practicing Rust - differently from other languages - requires "having read the whole reference". And that's the problem that I have. In high school I was handheld into C / C++ with weekly lessons. By the time I started my career I abandoned C because the things I worked on professionally had no benefit from manual memory management. Now the thing that I want to write, an embedded database, requires manual memory management and no runtime. I could, in theory, go back and do it in C. It'd be slow working in a language that I haven't done anything in since 2002, but at least I'm familiar with all the conventions. Do I basically need to spend 40-80 hours doing silly exercises just to ease into the new conventions and mental model?
- pizza234 6y ago
  It's not really clear what you mean with "silly exercises". One of the resources is a course for building "a [...] networked, parallel and asynchronous key/value store", which is far from being a "silly exercise". Even ignoring that, it's a matter of big picture. If learning Rust is only for this project, or only to be "quickly proficient in a new language", then I don't think it fits the specific case. The may be alternatives; I don't have experience (somebody else can surely advice better) something like C++ with smart pointers or memory safe D, I guess, could fit. In the big picture of a career, or even in the context of a single company, spending 40/80 hours to be proficient in a language is essentially an insignificant time.
  - gwbas1c 6y ago
    > It's not really clear what you mean with "silly exercises" At this point in my experience, if I want to learn a language, I write something "easy" in the language that I want to write for my enjoyment. For example, when I was between jobs I wrote a personal blog engine in NodeJS so I could get up to speed in modern Javascript and the node ecosystem: https://github.com/GWBasic/z3 https://github.com/GWBasic/z3 "Silly exercises" implies a programming exercise that has little point outside of instructing a basic concept: The kind of exercises I did in high school when I learned C are an example; there was no outside purpose to the code itself. IE, there's no tangible use to the code when it's complete. What I did 3 years ago was write a small program in Rust that opens links listed in a text file. (I've written many versions of this program over the last 18 years, mostly for self-education.) When I first wrote the program, it was mostly copy & paste, but it compiled even though I didn't understand most of it. Last night I decided that I was going to recompile it on Windows as my first exercise. I had to change the "open a link" library because it only compiled on Mac, which required changing some code: https://github.com/GWBasic/open_links https://github.com/GWBasic/open_links Now I'm going to try porting my in-browser Javascript in Z3 to Rust + WebAssembly. Let's see how far I can get!

gwbas1c 6y ago

> I find that starting practicing Rust - differently from other languages - requires "having read the whole reference". And that's the problem that I have. In high school I was handheld into C / C++ with weekly lessons. By the time I started my career I abandoned C because the things I worked on professionally had no benefit from manual memory management. Now the thing that I want to write, an embedded database, requires manual memory management and no runtime. I could, in theory, go back and do it in C. It'd be slow working in a language that I haven't done anything in since 2002, but at least I'm familiar with all the conventions. Do I basically need to spend 40-80 hours doing silly exercises just to ease into the new conventions and mental model?

pizza234 6y ago
It's not really clear what you mean with "silly exercises". One of the resources is a course for building "a [...] networked, parallel and asynchronous key/value store", which is far from being a "silly exercise". Even ignoring that, it's a matter of big picture. If learning Rust is only for this project, or only to be "quickly proficient in a new language", then I don't think it fits the specific case. The may be alternatives; I don't have experience (somebody else can surely advice better) something like C++ with smart pointers or memory safe D, I guess, could fit. In the big picture of a career, or even in the context of a single company, spending 40/80 hours to be proficient in a language is essentially an insignificant time.
- gwbas1c 6y ago
  > It's not really clear what you mean with "silly exercises" At this point in my experience, if I want to learn a language, I write something "easy" in the language that I want to write for my enjoyment. For example, when I was between jobs I wrote a personal blog engine in NodeJS so I could get up to speed in modern Javascript and the node ecosystem: https://github.com/GWBasic/z3 https://github.com/GWBasic/z3 "Silly exercises" implies a programming exercise that has little point outside of instructing a basic concept: The kind of exercises I did in high school when I learned C are an example; there was no outside purpose to the code itself. IE, there's no tangible use to the code when it's complete. What I did 3 years ago was write a small program in Rust that opens links listed in a text file. (I've written many versions of this program over the last 18 years, mostly for self-education.) When I first wrote the program, it was mostly copy & paste, but it compiled even though I didn't understand most of it. Last night I decided that I was going to recompile it on Windows as my first exercise. I had to change the "open a link" library because it only compiled on Mac, which required changing some code: https://github.com/GWBasic/open_links https://github.com/GWBasic/open_links Now I'm going to try porting my in-browser Javascript in Z3 to Rust + WebAssembly. Let's see how far I can get!