1.3 About the Book
Several excellent and thorough Rust books already exist. Notable examples include the official guide, The Book, and more comprehensive works such as Programming Rust, 2nd Edition by Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff, and Leonora F. S. Tindall. For those seeking deeper insights, Rust for Rustaceans by Jon Gjengset and the online resource Effective Rust are highly recommended. Additional practical resources include Rust by Example and the Rust Cookbook. Numerous video tutorials are also available for visual learners.
Amazon lists many other Rust books, but assessing their quality beforehand can be challenging. Some may offer valuable content, while others might contain trivial information, potentially generated by AI without sufficient review or simply repurposed from free online sources.
Given this abundance of material, one might reasonably ask: why write another Rust book? Traditionally, creating a high-quality technical book demands deep subject matter expertise, strong writing skills, and a significant time investment—often exceeding a thousand hours. Professional editing and proofreading by established publishers have typically been crucial for eliminating errors, ensuring clarity, and producing a text that is genuinely useful and enjoyable to read.
Some existing Rust books tend towards verbosity, perhaps over-explaining certain concepts. Books focusing purely on Rust, written in concise, professional technical English, are somewhat less common. This might be partly because Rust is a complex language with several unconventional concepts (like ownership and borrowing). Authors often try to compensate by providing elaborate explanations, sometimes adopting a teaching style better suited for absolute beginners rather than experienced programmers transitioning from other languages. Therefore, a more compact, focused book tailored to this audience could be valuable, though whether the effort required is justified remains debatable.
However, the landscape of technical writing has changed significantly, especially over the last couple of years, due to the advent of powerful AI tools. These tools can substantially reduce the workload involved. Routine yet time-consuming tasks like checking grammar and spelling—often a hurdle for non-native English speakers—can now be handled reliably by AI. AI can also assist in refining writing style, for example, by breaking down overly long sentences, reducing wordiness, or removing repetitive phrasing. Beyond editing, AI can help generate initial drafts for sections, suggest relevant content additions, assist in reorganizing material, propose code examples, or identify redundancies. While AI cannot yet autonomously write a complete, high-quality book on a complex subject like Rust, an iterative process involving AI assistance combined with careful human oversight, review, and expertise can save a considerable amount of time and effort.
One of the most significant benefits lies in grammar correction and style refinement, tasks that can be particularly tedious and error-prone for authors writing in a non-native language.
This book project began in September 2024 partly as an experiment: could AI assistance make it feasible to produce a high-quality Rust book without the traditional year-long (or longer) commitment? The results have been promising, suggesting that the total effort can be reduced significantly, perhaps by around half. For native English speakers with strong writing skills, the time savings might be less dramatic but still substantial.
Some might argue for waiting a few more years until AI potentially reaches a stage where it can generate complete, high-quality, and perhaps even personalized books on demand. We believe that future is likely not too distant. However, with this book now nearing completion, the hundreds of hours already invested have yielded a valuable result.
This book primarily targets individuals with existing systems programming experience—those familiar with statically typed, compiled languages such as C, C++, D, Zig, Nim, Ada, Crystal, or similar. It is not intended as a first introduction to programming. Readers whose primary experience is with dynamically typed languages like Python might find the official Rust book or other resources tailored to that transition more suitable.
Our goal is to present Rust’s fundamental concepts as succinctly as possible. We aim to avoid unnecessary repetition, overly lengthy theoretical discussions, and extensive coverage of basic programming principles or computer hardware fundamentals. The focus is on core Rust language features (initially excluding advanced topics like macros and async programming in full depth) within a target length of fewer than 500 pages. Consequently, we limit the inclusion of deep dives into niche topics or very large, complex code examples. We believe that exhaustive detail on every minor feature is less critical today, given the ready availability of Rust’s official documentation, specialized online resources, and capable AI assistants for answering specific queries. Most readers do not need to memorize every nuance of features they might rarely encounter.
The title Rust for C Programmers reflects this objective: to provide an efficient pathway into Rust for experienced developers, particularly those coming from a C or C++ background.
Structuring a book about a language as interconnected as Rust presented challenges. We have attempted to introduce Rust’s most compelling and practical features relatively early, while acknowledging the inherent dependencies between different concepts. Although reading the chapters sequentially is generally recommended, they are not so tightly coupled as to make out-of-order reading impossible—though you might occasionally encounter forward or backward references.
When viewing the online version of this book (generated using the mdbook tool), you can typically select different visual themes (e.g., light/dark) from a menu and utilize the built-in search functionality. If the default font size appears too small, most web browsers allow you to increase the page zoom level (often using ‘Ctrl’ + ‘+’). Code examples containing lines hidden for brevity can usually be expanded by clicking on them. Many examples include a button to run the code directly in the Rust Playground. You can also modify the examples in place before running them, or simply copy and paste the code into the Rust Playground website yourself. We recommend reading the online version in a web browser equipped with a persistent text highlighting tool or extension (such as the ‘Textmarker’ addon for Firefox or similar tools for other browsers), which can be helpful for marking important sections. Most modern browsers also offer the capability to save web pages for offline viewing. Additionally, mdbook can optionally be used to generate a PDF version of the entire book. Other formats like EPUB or MOBI for dedicated e-readers are not currently supported by the standard tooling.
Whether a printed version of this book will be published remains undecided. Printed computer books tend to become outdated relatively quickly, and the costs associated with publishing, printing, and distribution might consume a significant portion of potential revenue. On the other hand, making the book available through platforms like Amazon could be an effective way to reach a wider audience.