Stage 1 of 7 · 10 lessons · ~6 months

Your language and how HTTP works

Get fluent in one backend language and its runtime, and learn exactly what happens between a client and your server. Everything later in this roadmap sits on these two things.

Start: The terminal and Git

Lessons· one lesson for each topic, in this order

Start with· follow one of these

BookFree
The Rust Programming Language
The Rust Project · Beginner
The official book, free online: read ownership, enums, error handling and traits slowly
GuideFree
Tokio Tutorial
Tokio · Intermediate
The official Tokio tutorial: tasks, shared state, channels and the async model Axum runs on

Practise

Rustlings
Small exercises that follow the book chapter by chapter, checked in your terminal
Exercism
Your language track: small exercises with free mentor feedback on idiomatic code

Keep handy

Rust by Example
Runnable examples to look up while you write: traits, generics, errors and Cargo
MDN Web Docs
Read the HTTP overview, methods, headers and status code pages until they feel obvious

Also worth your time

What Happens When You Type a URL? (Step-by-Step Explanation) (opens in a new tab)Read
The DNS, TCP, TLS and HTTP steps behind every request your backend will handle

Before moving on: Write a small Rust command line tool with Cargo and unit tests run by cargo test, push it to GitHub in sensible commits, and explain every line of output from curl -v against a real website.

Tauseef's advice

Read the ownership and error handling chapters of the Rust book slowly and do Rustlings alongside them; the compiler errors are the lesson, so read them in full. Expect the first weeks to feel slower than Go or Python, and do not reach for .clone() and .unwrap() to make that feeling stop.