New book: Learn Rust Programming Today

Introducing Learn Rust Programming Today - a different kind of programming book for anyone who wants to learn Rust.

Learn Rust Programming Today
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Announcing a new book about learning how to program in Rust! It will be quite different from the usual programming book.

Most programming books will present you isolated examples of language syntax, leaving you to complete the picture when you actually need to achieve something. Learn Rust Programming Today takes you on a complete journey from the start to the finished program that you can use, learning the necessary features of Rust on the way.

In just 10 years, Rust has become one of the most interesting new programming languages. As a software developer it may well be in your interest to learn Rust, and this book is going to help you.

The book is intended for developers who already know how to program in some other language, but find that they want to or need to learn Rust. The book will not waste your time explaining what a variable or a for loop is, but rather gives you the information you need about how they appear in Rust, along with features that may not have exact equivalents in other programming languages.

Learn Rust Programming Today will be give you concepts, tools and ideas for building further Rust programs, especially command-line applications.

I would like to invite you to give feedback and suggestions about the topics that the book will cover and the order of presentation, or to just express your interest in the book. Please send your comments by e-mail to the address "info" (at) "coniferproductions" (dot) "com", and I will let you know once the book is available.

Book outline

Here is a draft outline of the book. Everything is, of course, subject to change, based on your feedback and my thinking. Each section will have much more material than the headings indicate.

The book is divided into four parts:

During the course of the book we will be building Today, a Rust command-line application that shows things that happened on this day in history (historical events, births of notable people, and so on) from various sources. We will also extend the program to handle days that are observed annually, such as Pi Day, and recurring events. You will also be able to add your own events.

Have a look at the table of contents as of 2026-04-21: Table of Contents (PDF)

Part I: Getting Started with Rust

The first part of the book tells you about the Rust programming tools you need, starting from the Rust Playground, through the Rust compiler and Cargo, and ending with a look at editors and IDEs.

Here is a sample chapter from Part I: Chapter 2: Getting the Rust Tools (PDF)

Part II: Building Blocks of Rust Programs

The second part is a tour of the Rust features we will be using in the Today program. We start with some examples that already deal with historical events, and build up from there. The part ends with a program that computes your age in days, given your birthdate. We will later drop this into the Today program.

Here is a sample chapter from Part II: Chapter 8: Iteration and Looping (PDF)

Part III: Programming Today

This part is the biggest in the book. We will start to really develop the Today program, with data structures and modules that make the program easy to understand and modify.

Here we introduce the concept of event providers, which will give us the events we need from either local files or databases, or from a network API. We will also make a configuration file for the Today program, filter events by criteria, and look at how to augment the program with new event kinds.

Finally we will look at handling command-line arguments and adding new events to those event providers that support adding. We'll also learn about logging.

Here is a sample chapter from Part III: Chapter 29: Configuration Directories (PDF)

Part IV: Going Further Than Today

After Part III you will already have a working application that can be run every time you open a terminal window. This last part of the book is about extending the program with new features, and refactoring the existing code in the process.

Available Soon

The title of the book, Learn Rust Programming Today, can be read in different ways. The combinations that make most sense, given the outline above, are: "Learn Rust", "Rust Programming", and "Programming Today"; the latter meaning both "programming the Today application" and also "programming in this day and age".

The book will be self-published. Expected availability is later in 2026. Looking forward to your comments!