The Rust Programming Language

What it is

The Rust Programming Language is the official introduction to Rust, written by Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols and Chris Krycho with contributions from the Rust community. It lives on doc.rust-lang.org and ships with every Rust installation, so rustup doc --book opens it offline. The online version assumes Rust 1.90 or later with the 2024 edition set in Cargo.toml. No Starch Press publishes the same text in print as a third edition built on the 2024 edition.

Is it worth your time?

Yes, for almost everyone learning Rust. Ownership, borrowing and lifetimes are the ideas that make Rust feel different, and the book explains them more carefully than most paid courses. Nearly every other Rust resource, including the Tokio tutorial and Rustlings, assumes you have read it or tells you to read it alongside.

How to read it for backend work

Read chapters 1 to 10 closely: the guessing game, ownership, structs, enums and match, modules and Cargo, collections, error handling with Result, and generics, traits and lifetimes. Chapter 11 on testing and chapter 16 on concurrency matter for services too. The chapters on async and the final multithreaded web server project show what frameworks like Axum do for you underneath.

Type every example rather than reading it. When the compiler rejects your code, read the whole error message: Rust's errors usually explain the rule you broke and suggest a fix.

How long it takes

Reading alone takes a couple of weeks. Reading, typing the examples and doing Rustlings alongside it takes most people one to two months at a steady pace. The ownership chapter is where people slow down; that is normal, and worth the time.

Prerequisites

You should already be comfortable in one programming language: variables, functions, loops and basic data structures. You do not need C or C++. Knowing what a pointer or the stack and heap are helps, but the book explains both.

Free or paid?

The online book is free. The print and ebook editions from No Starch Press are paid and contain the same material, for people who prefer paper.

What you can do after it

Write idiomatic Rust with structs, enums, traits and proper error handling, organise a project with Cargo and modules, and read the docs of crates like Tokio, Axum and SQLx without getting lost.

Common questions

Should I do Rustlings at the same time? Yes. Rustlings exercises follow the book's chapters and turn reading into practice.

Is it out of date? The online book is updated with the language; check the version note on its first page.