Rust for C-Programmers

1.3 About the Book

There are already several thorough Rust books, including the official guide, The Book, and more detailed works such as Programming Rust by Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff, and Leonora F. S. Tindall. For a deeper dive, Rust for Rustaceans by Jon Gjengset and the online resource Effective Rust are also excellent.
Amazon indeed lists many other Rust books, but their quality is not always evident. Some might be great, while others may contain trivial or unhelpful content—possibly generated by AI or copied from free online sources.
Additional learning resources include Rust by Example and the Rust Cookbook. There are also many video tutorials for visual learners.

With so much available, you might wonder why another Rust book is needed. Traditionally, creating a solid technical book requires deep expertise, strong writing skills, and substantial time—often more than a thousand hours. Professional editing and proofreading by established publishers have typically been necessary to remove errors, ensure clarity, and make the text enjoyable to read.

Some Rust books become verbose by over-explaining certain topics. Books focusing on Rust, written in concise technical English, are somewhat scarce. One reason is that Rust is a complex language with some unusual concepts. Authors often compensate by adding elaborate explanations, sometimes adopting a style aimed at younger readers rather than adults with existing programming knowledge. A more compact, focused book may therefore be worthwhile, though whether the effort is justified remains open to debate.

However, AI tools have greatly reduced the workload involved in writing such a book, especially over the last two years. Routine tasks like grammar and spelling checks—which can be challenging for non-native English speakers—are now handled reliably by AI. AI can also enhance writing style by breaking up overly long sentences, reducing verbosity, and removing repetitive material. Beyond these tasks, AI can generate initial chapter drafts, insert new content, reorganize sections, suggest examples, or remove redundancies. Although AI still cannot produce a complete book by itself—especially one covering a complex topic like Rust—an iterative, AI-assisted approach with careful human review can save a significant amount of time and effort.

One of the greatest benefits is in grammar correction, a tedious and mistake-prone step for authors who are not native English speakers.

This book started in September 2024 as an experiment to test whether AI assistance could make it possible to produce a high-quality Rust book without investing an entire year. The results were promising: total work was cut by about half. For native speakers with strong writing skills, the time savings might be slightly lower.

Some might ask why not wait a few more years for AI to reach the point of generating complete, high-quality, and even personalized books on its own. We believe that day will come relatively soon. However, with this book now near completion, the hundreds of hours invested have already proven their value.

This book primarily targets those with systems programming experience—people familiar with statically typed, compiled languages such as C, C++, D, Zig, Nim, Ada, Crystal, and others. It is not intended for absolute beginners, and those who have only used languages like Python might prefer the official Rust book or another resource geared toward that background.

Our aim is to present Rust’s fundamentals as succinctly as possible, avoiding repetition, lengthy discussions, and broad coverage of basic programming or hardware topics. We focus on core Rust features (excluding macros and async) in fewer than 500 pages, limiting deeper explorations or larger code examples. We believe extensive details are less vital today since Rust’s language specification, specialized online resources, and AI tools are readily available. Most readers do not need to memorize every minor feature they might rarely use.

The title Rust for C-Programmers reflects the book’s goal: providing an efficient introduction to Rust for experienced developers, especially those coming from a C background.

Structuring a book about a language as complex as Rust was challenging. We tried to showcase Rust’s most compelling and practical features early, while acknowledging the dependencies between various topics. It is generally best to read the chapters in order, but they are not so interconnected that out-of-order reading is impossible—though you might occasionally encounter references to earlier content.

When viewing the online version of this book (generated by the mdbook tool), you can select different themes from a drop-down menu and use the built-in search function. If the default font size is too small, most web browsers let you zoom in using 'CTRL +'. Code examples with hidden lines can be expanded by clicking on them, and you can often run the examples directly in the Rust Playground. You can also edit the examples before running them, or copy and paste them into the Rust Playground.
We recommend reading the online version in a web browser that supports permanent text highlighting, such as Firefox with the text-marker plugin.
Most browsers also have the ability to save web pages for offline reading, and you can optionally create a PDF using mdbook. Other book formats like Epub or Mobi for e-readers are currently not supported.

It is unclear whether a printed version of this book will be published. Printed computer books quickly become outdated, and publishing and promotion costs may consume most of the revenue. On the other hand, releasing the book on Amazon might be an effective way to reach a broader audience.