Welcome! This book will teach you about the Rust Programming Language. Rust is a systems programming language focused on three goals: safety, speed, and concurrency. It maintains these goals without having a garbage collector, making it a useful language for a number of use cases other languages aren’t good at: embedding in other languages, programs with specific space and time requirements, and writing low-level code, like device drivers and operating systems. It improves on current languages targeting this space by having a number of compile-time safety checks that produce no runtime overhead, while eliminating all data races. Rust also aims to achieve ‘zero-cost abstractions’ even though some of these abstractions feel like those of a high-level language. Even then, Rust still allows precise control like a low-level language would.

“The Rust Programming Language” is split into chapters. This introduction is the first. After this:

• Getting started - Set up your computer for Rust development.
• Tutorial: Guessing Game - Learn some Rust with a small project.
• Syntax and Semantics - Each bit of Rust, broken down into small chunks.
• Effective Rust - Higher-level concepts for writing excellent Rust code.
• Glossary - A reference of terms used in the book.
• Bibliography - Background on Rust's influences, papers about Rust.

The source files from which this book is generated can be found on GitHub.