Hi All! Welcome to the Reading Club for Rust’s “The Book” (“The Rust Programming Language”). This is week 1 (the beginning!!).
Have a shot at going through “the reading” and post any thoughts, confusions or insights here
“The Reading”
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Finish up to Chapter 2: “Programming a Guessing Game”
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The Book: https://rust-book.cs.brown.edu/title-page.html (the special Brown University version with quizzes etc)
The Twitch Stream
- @sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.works ran a twitch stream on these chapters which is now on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou2c5J6FmsM
- You might prefer watching and listening to that rather than reading the book.
- Be sure to catch future streams (will/should be weekly: https://www.twitch.tv/deerfromsmoke)
What’s Next Week?
- Chapters 3 and 4
- Start thinking about challenges or puzzles to try as we go in order to get some applied practice!
- EG, Advent of Code
- Maybe some basic/toy web apps such as a “todo”
On the whole primitive types and references thing, I find it helps me to remember that a reference/pointer (subtle but importance difference between rust and C where rust has more guarantees around a pointer to make it a "reference) is also basically just a number like a “primitive” i32 etc. And references/pointers obviously (?) have to get passed by value or copied (in order to “survive” their original stack frame right?), so passing any primitive by value or copying it really isn’t different from passing it by reference, apart from when you’re running a borrow checker for managing memory of course.