The Rust Programming Language
by Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols · first published 2018
75% recommend20% neutral5% critical
Why HN recommends it
Freely available official guide that walks through installation, ownership, traits and OOP differences in readable prose. Suits newcomers, especially those from Ruby or JavaScript, and works as a reference later.
Common criticism: Some find it too hard for beginners or light on low-level machine details
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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There are two books with similar titles and I'm under the impression that you don't talk about the one the OP had in mind: https://www.amazon.com/Rust-Programming-Language-Steve-Klabn... https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Rust-Fast-Systems-Develop... I think both are good books, I already have the second one and preordered the first.
on “Learning Rust” ↗…Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg 2. The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek 3. Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell 4. An American Life by Ronald Reagan 5. The Rust Programming Language by Steve Kablink
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?” ↗…started in Rust. I've been following since the original "Rust for Rubyists" from Steve Klabnik. Steve if you are listening, thanks for putting all the hard work into the original book, the revision as The Rust Programming Language, and this most recent revision.
on “Next Iteration of “The Rust Programming Language” Book” ↗Thanks for the book! A++ would read again. https://www.amazon.com/Rust-Programming-Language-Steve-Klabn...
on “Announcing Rust 1.35.0” ↗…and self-contained pieces of information. When it comes to e-books, I think the ones that are less like traditional books and more embrace the possibilities of the medium are best. Klabnik/Nichols "The Rust Programming Language" is a great example, even more so Google's "Comprehensive Rust".
on “If you could only have one programming book on bookshelf what would it be?” ↗For me -- 0: Neuromancer, William Gibson 1: The Rust programming Language, Carol Nichols and Steve Klabnik 2: Getting Clojure, Russ Olsen Interesting times indeed... :)
on “Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?” ↗…rule that developers should learn only the 'top 5' 'industry' languages? I've started learning Rust, for a few reasons: - I read a couple of chapters of Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols' excellent "The Rust Programming Language" a while back and enjoyed it so much just as a book that I promised myself I'd read the whole thing when I had time. Now I do, so I am. - Rust instantiates some concepts that I'm familiar with but only…
on “Practical Networked Applications in Rust, Part 1: Non-Networked Key-Value Store” ↗…safety. Completely changed how I structure programs. After the Rust book I dove right into personal projects in Swift and fundamentals I learned in Rust translated very well. [0] https://nostarch.com/rust-programming-language-2nd-edition
on “Ask HN: The Required Fundamentals for Self-Taught Programming” ↗…stress that: please use or invest at a superior tooling but also understand that it takes a lot of time and efforts regardless of that. Rust documentation is great partly because its main "book" (The Rust Programming Language) was initially written by paid and thus dedicated authors. Rust would still have good documentation without that investment, but probably its book would've been much weaker or even replaced by the Language…
on “Why is language documentation still so terrible?” ↗The Rust Programming Language
on “Ask HN: Best book to gift someone for getting into software engineering?” ↗I started learning Rust over the weekends and I think the second edition "The Rust Programming Language" is among the best introductory books on a programming language I have read (well half way so far). As someone not only new to Rust but also systems programming in general I especially appreciate that the chapters include actual reasoning about why things are how they are in Rust and that they
on “Rust's 2018 roadmap” ↗I'm surprised and disappointed to learn that Mozilla didn't value Steve's work enough. The documentation, especially the book [1] which he authored, is the gold standard that every software project should aspire to. As someone who learned the language recently, it's possible that I might have abandoned it if the documentation and learning materials hadn't been so good. I also thought his work in
on “Thank u, next” ↗Not true for everyone. I learned Rust from The Rust Programming Language ("The Rust Book") and "Rust for Rustaceans." Sure, coming from C/C++, I could have learned the syntax online but learning best idioms and styles required the time and commitment to read a book cover-to-cover.…
on “Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore” ↗I wrote you a little example but i think you need to know rust to really understand it :( https://is.gd/FlBCJ0 you cannot uncomment the comments in the main function and use it wrong, the compiler prevents you to compile this code. these two sections from the book may help understad this https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ownership.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/references-and-borrowing.html
on “Rust vs. Go” ↗…because I wanted to write a program. I never wanted to "Learn C" I just kept on reading chapters of K&R so that I could write my program (Just a small game). Now, decades later, I just finished reading "The Rust Programming Language" with no real desire to write a program -- I just wanted to read the book. Great language but I have this sort of empty feeling -- kind of like "What now". I wonder how many people suffer from this. I'll…
on “Learn by Programming or Learn Programming to Program?” ↗