1.4 About the Authors
The main author, Dr. S. Salewski, studied Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science at the University of Hamburg (Germany), earning his Ph.D. in laser physics in 2005. His work includes fiber laser research, electronics, and software development in Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon, C, Ruby, Nim, and Rust. Some of his projects—such as Nim GTK GUI bindings, Nim implementations of an N-dimensional RTree, and a fully dynamic constrained Delaunay triangulation—are freely available at https://github.com/StefanSalewski. This repository also hosts a Rust version of his tiny chess engine (with GTK, EGUI, and Bevy graphical interfaces), selected chapters of this book in Markdown, and materials for another book by the same author about the Nim programming language, published online in 2020.
Naturally, much of this book’s content draws from various Rust community resources, including numerous printed books, the official online Rust Book, Rust’s language specification and library documentation, Rust-by-example, the Cargo Book, the Rust Performance Book, and many others.
As noted earlier, this book was written with significant AI assistance. In modern technical publishing, avoiding AI altogether would be highly inefficient and likely result in a lower-quality product. Virtually all high-quality goods we use daily are produced with advanced tools, and excluding such tools from creating a programming book makes little sense.
Initially, we tried listing each AI tool used, but the list grew cumbersome. Today’s large language models contain substantial knowledge of Rust and can produce helpful draft texts, as well as perform grammar and style refinements. For final editing, we primarily relied on GPT-4 o1, which is particularly skilled at creating succinct paraphrases and sometimes discards lengthy sections of the author’s text if it deems them too verbose. By using a paid OpenAI subscription, we guided the AI toward a concise, neutral technical style in each final iteration, ensuring a coherent and consistent presentation.