Rust Fundamentals

Understand why Rust exists, what problems it solves, and how to install and run your first Rust program. Learn about memory safety without garbage collection, preventing data races, and Rust's ecosystem.

Master Rust's type system, variable declaration, constants, and memory layout. Understand stack vs heap allocation, primitives, compound types, and how Rust prevents null pointer errors.

Learn Rust's ownership rules - each value has one owner, values drop when owners go out of scope, and ownership transfers on assignment. Understand move semantics, copy semantics, and the Drop trait.

Master functions with ownership semantics, expressions vs statements, and control flow constructs. Learn how to pass values by ownership, reference, or mutable reference.

Understand borrowing rules - multiple immutable references OR one mutable reference. Learn how Rust prevents data races at compile time through references and the borrow checker.

Learn to create custom types with structs, implement methods, and understand ownership in structs. Master value receivers vs pointer receivers and associated functions.

Master enums to represent variants, pattern matching with match expressions, and exhaustiveness checking. Understand algebraic data types and how Rust's enums are more powerful than in other languages.

Learn Rust's explicit error handling with Result and Option enums. Master the ? operator, error propagation, and creating custom error types. No more surprise crashes.

Master traits to define shared behavior and generics to write code for any type. Learn trait bounds, derive attributes, and how Rust achieves zero-cost abstractions through static dispatch.

Understand lifetime annotations and how the borrow checker uses lifetimes to ensure references remain valid. Learn lifetime elision rules, lifetimes in structs, and the 'static lifetime.

Master vectors, hash maps, and strings. Learn the Iterator trait and iterator adapters for functional programming patterns that compile to efficient code. Zero-cost abstractions in practice.

Organize code with modules, create reusable crates, write tests with the built-in framework, and generate documentation. Learn to publish crates to crates.io with confidence.