Book Review: Rust in a Month of Lunches

I have attempted to learn Rust many times over the past few years. There are two main reasons why I have not picked up the Rust language until recently:

1. The learning curve seems steep for a language that I may not end up using on a day-to-day basis.
2. Most of the learning material is too theoretical and not practical enough for me to understand how these concepts are applied in real-world projects.

The first point is no longer a concern as I now work at a company that uses Rust in production. The second point is what motivated me to finally pick up the book Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches. It promised to be an approachable guide to Rust that is practical and immediately applicable to real-world projects. Seduced by these promises, along with the confidence of Amazon’s 30-day money back guarantee, I decided to give it a shot.

I am very happy to say that this book met these promises and in some cases exceeded them. This is not a book that will teach you how to “code” in general, so it is assumed that you already have some programming experience before you start. Each chapter is focused on a specific Rust concept, and the author gives many coding examples that apply these concepts. You can read the book from beginning to end if you are new to Rust (like me), or you can reference it if you are already somewhat familiar with the language. I imagine I will come back to reference the book many times as I continue to use the language. There are some areas where the coding examples pull ideas from future chapters, but the author lets you know this ahead of time so you can skip those sections if you are not yet ready.

I also really like the story of the author in the beginning of the book. It can be intimidating to read books from people who learned to code at 8 years old and have been studying these languages for years. The author of this book, however, actually spent most of his life in other careers and picked up Rust later in life. It gave me the confidence that I could learn this language as well, if I just put in the time and stayed consistent. Which this book will do if you take on one chapter a day (or every few days) and read it end to end.

After reading, I can say that I have Rust code running in production at my company now, and plan on having more in the future. There is no hiding that it has a steep learning curve. I think that we in the tech industry have gotten so used to instant gratification from languages like Python and JavaScript that we forget that this is not the case for other languages. If you are willing to put in the time, however, the rewards can be great, which is what Rust promises (and the compiler drills into your head constantly as well).

In addition to reading books, I like to follow Youtube streamers who write Rust as well. The combination of doing this has been very effective for me. One example is John Gjenset. He often creates videos of him implementing small projects in Rust that use a lot of the concepts discussed in the book. I find that watching these videos helps cement how these concepts apply in real-world projects.

Thanks for reading! I hope this encourages you to pick up this book (and Rust) and give it a shot.

Medium Post: Book Review: Rust in a Month of Lunches