Paul Johnson - Learning Rust: A comprehensive guide to writing Rust applications

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First published: November 2017

Production reference: 1221117

ISBN 978-1-78588-430-6

www.packtpub.com

Paul Johnson has been writing software since the early 1980s on machines ranging from the ZX81 and servers to his trusty Mac, and has used more languages than he can remember. He is a qualified scuba diver and college lecturer. Paul lives with his wife, kids, and pets, and listens to an inordinate amount of rock and metal on Primordial Radio. This is his third book for Packt.

Vesa Kaihlavirta has been programming since he was 5, beginning with C64 Basic. His main professional goal in life is to increase awareness about programming languages and software quality in all industries that use software. He's an Arch Linux Developer Fellow and has been working in the telecom and financial industry for over a decade. Vesa lives in Central Finland, in Jyvskyl. Vesa worked on the final editing phase of Learning Rust.

Ivo Balbaert is currently a lecturer of (web) programming and databases at CVO Antwerpen (www.cvoantwerpen.be), a community college in Belgium. He received a PhD in applied physics from the University of Antwerp in 1986. He worked for 20 years in the software industry as a developer and consultant at several companies, and for 10 years as a project manager at the Antwerp University Hospital . From 2000 onwards, he switched to partly teaching and partly developing software (KHM Mechelen, CVO Antwerpen).

In 2012, he authored a book on the Go programming language, The Way To Go, IUniverse. In 2013, in collaboration with Dzenan Ridzanovic, he wrote Learning Dart and Dart Cookbook, followed by Getting Started with Julia Programming Language and Rust Essentials, all published by Packt.

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BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Rust is a new programming language. It offers performance and safety that is equivalent to, or even surpasses, modern C++ while being a modern language with a relatively low barrier to entry. Rust's momentum, combined with its active and friendly community, promise a great future for the language.

While modern and fluent, Rust is not a particularly easy language. The memory management system keeps track of the life of every entity that is used in your program and is designed in such a way that this tracking can typically happen entirely at compile time. The Rust programmer's burden is to help the compiler when it cannot decide for itself what should happen. Since modern programming is possible without ever facing such responsibilities, a modern programmer may not immediately feel comfortable with Rust.