In a recent casual group chat, I jokingly mentioned the learning curve of the Rust programming language, which drew a friend to jestingly compare it to the popular gaming sensation “Genshin Impact” in the programming community. Despite the playful tone, this conversation truly reflected our deep interest and attention to the field of Rust.
In recent years, Rust has gradually revealed its strength in commercial applications, with Mozilla developing the Stylo engine for the Firefox browser using Rust, Dropbox choosing Rust to write its file storage system, and Discord deciding to rewrite their original Go-written code in Rust in order to improve latency issues. In fact, many renowned companies have begun to integrate Rust into their tech stacks.
Despite Rust’s popularity, many engineers still view it as a tough nut to crack, considering its learning path quite daunting. After all, challenges like jousting with the compiler and the significant paradigm shift in thinking must be overcome in the early stages of learning. This means that to master Rust, one must have a deep understanding of advanced concepts like memory management, stacks, references, and variable scopes, which is undoubtedly more demanding than learning other languages.
However, the difficulty of learning Rust also means that the rewards it brings are more enticing. Once you have mastered Rust, your skills become exceptionally valuable, and you are no longer easily replaceable as a mere “tool person”. Nevertheless, Chinese learning resources for Rust are still scarce, neither friendly nor systematic for beginners. In light of practical needs and project applications of Rust, this article recommends Chen Tian’s Rust course.
Upon examining the course syllabus, one can see that the weekly content is rich and compact, covering most of the core concepts and techniques in Rust development right from the start. Chen Tian’s course does not delve into the language core; instead, it offers a broad perspective to help learners become aware of and gradually master Rust.
In the first week, there are over ten hours of lessons, divided into 14 lectures, involving simple csv to json/yaml conversions, and then gradually expanding to create a rich set of tools; it also introduces basic knowledge like hashing, encryption, signing, and base64. The culmination of the first week is building an HTTP static file server as an example.
Then, the second week is a challenge of the difficult points of concurrency and asynchronous programming. The content is still over ten hours of study, including more than two thousand lines of code for hands-on practice, aimed at helping students understand and master concurrency and no longer feel intimidated by concurrent programming.
While the content of the course is quite intensive for the first two weeks, as the students become familiar with Rust, the following learning will gradually return to a normal pace. Talking about the course’s author Chen Tian, as the Senior Vice President of R&D at TubiTV, North America’s largest free streaming service, his previous work “The First Lesson in Rust Programming” has already received widespread acclaim from learners.
In recent software development training, the Rust programming language course was an immediate hit upon its release, attracting a lot of devoted fans and showing its excellent quality and reliability. Rust, with its unique features, is quickly emerging as a software development star, becoming the focus of attention.
In terms of national policies and planning, Rust has gained unexpected recognition. Not long ago, the White House in the United States published a white paper that carries significant guidance, which particularly emphasized the importance of memory safety for future software development. The content of the white paper seems to hint at the admiration and expectation for the Rust language, as Rust provides a series of guarantees in memory safety.
For those beginners who yearn to deeply understand Rust, Chen Tian’s video course “Rust First Experience” provides an excellent learning opportunity. The course content is rigorous yet practical, with each lesson revolving around a core knowledge point. However, it should be noted to interested learners that this course is part of paid content, but a limited-time offer of 3 hours of free viewing is currently available. Having professional guidance on the journey of self-taught programming can indeed make the learning process smoother and more efficient.