Effective Rust

Afterword

Hopefully the advice, suggestions, and information in this book will help you become a fluent, productive Rust programmer. As the Preface describes, this book is intended to cover the second step in this process, after you’ve learned the basics from a core Rust reference book. But there are more steps you can take and directions to explore:

• Async Rust is not covered in this book but is likely to be needed for efficient, concurrent server-side applications. The online documentation provides an introduction to async, and the forthcoming Async Rust by Maxwell Flitton and Caroline Morton (O’Reilly, 2024) may also help.

• Moving in the other direction, bare-metal Rust might align with your interests and requirements. This goes beyond the introduction to no_std in Item 33 to a world where there’s no operating system and no allocation. The bare-metal Rust section of the Comprehensive Rust online course provides a good introduction here.

• Regardless of whether your interests are low-level or high-level, the crates.io ecosystem of third-party, open source crates is worth exploring—and contributing to. Curated summaries like blessed.rs or lib.rs can help navigate the huge number of possibilities.

• Rust discussion forums such as the Rust language forum or Reddit’s r/rust can provide help—and include a searchable index of questions that have been asked (and answered!) previously.

• If you find yourself relying on an existing library that’s not written in Rust (as per Item 34 ...