I started off with standard materials like "Rust By Example". I also tried to use Rust for simple stuff like command line utilities. Then I started working on

I started off with standard materials like "Rust By Example". I also tried to use Rust for simple stuff like command line utilities. Then I started working on a personal project, which motivated me to bull through lots of difficult problems. (This personal project happens to have been bindings for Apple Core Audio, but the point is to pick something you care about enough to motivate yourself.) Finally, I've found users.rust-lang.org invaluable. The first major challenge for me was the error handling ("WTF is `Box<dyn std::error::Error>`? What is `Box`? What is `dyn`?"). It got in the way as soon as I even tried to write command line utilities. Once you learn it, it's amazing, but out of the gate I continually stumbled and fell flat on my face. The second challenge was harder: coming from OOP languages, I was accustomed to structuring everything as large mutable heap-allocated classes with private fields, accessors, and an emphasis on opaque data structures and encapsulation. That is not idiomatic Rust, so I had to unlearn it and discover architectural alternatives. I don't know exactly how long it took before I felt comfortable, since I was learning in disconnected spurts rather than immersively all at once. It wasn't quick, though.