Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development 1st Edition

by Jim Blandy (Author), Jason Orendorff (Author)

23 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-1491927281

ISBN-10: 1491927283

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Rust is a new systems programming language that combines the performance and low-level control of C and C++ with memory safety and thread safety. Rust’s modern, flexible types ensure your program is free of null pointer dereferences, double frees, dangling pointers, and similar bugs, all at compile time, without runtime overhead. In multi-threaded code, Rust catches data races at compile time, making concurrency much easier to use.

Written by two experienced systems programmers, this book explains how Rust manages to bridge the gap between performance and safety, and how you can take advantage of it. Topics include:

How Rust represents values in memory (with diagrams)
Complete explanations of ownership, moves, borrows, and lifetimes
Cargo, rustdoc, unit tests, and how to publish your code on crates.io, Rust’s public package repository
High-level features like generic code, closures, collections, and iterators that make Rust productive and flexible
Concurrency in Rust: threads, mutexes, channels, and atomics, all much safer to use than in C or C++
Unsafe code, and how to preserve the integrity of ordinary code that uses it
Extended examples illustrating how pieces of the language fit together

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From the Publisher

Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development

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From the Preface

Rust is a language for systems programming.

This bears some explanation these days, as systems programming is unfamiliar to most working programmers. Yet it underlies everything we do.

You close your laptop. The operating system detects this, suspends all the running programs, turns off the screen, and puts the computer to sleep. Later, you open the laptop: the screen and other components are powered up again, and each program is able to pick up where it left off. We take this for granted. But systems programmers wrote a lot of code to make that happen.

This book will not teach you systems programming. In fact, this book covers many details of memory management that might seem unnecessarily abstruse at first, if you haven’t already done some systems programming on your own. But if you are a seasoned systems programmer, you’ll find that Rust is something exceptional: a new tool that eliminates major, well-understood problems that have plagued a whole industry for decades.

Who should read this book

If you’re already a systems programmer, and you’re ready for an alternative to C++, this book is for you.

If you’re an experienced developer in any programming language, whether that’s C#, Java, Python, JavaScript, or something else, this book is for you too. However, you don’t just need to learn Rust. To get the most out of the language, you also need to gain some experience with systems programming. We recommend reading this book while also implementing some systems programming side projects in Rust. Build something you’ve never built before, something that takes advantage of Rust’s speed, concurrency, and safety. The areas listed above should give you some ideas.

Systems programming is for:

operating systems
device drivers of all kinds
filesystems
databases
networking
cryptography
media codecs
media processing
memory management
text rendering
virtualization and software containers
scientific simulations
games

About the Author

Jim Blandy has been programming since 1981, and writing Free software since 1990. He has been the maintainer of GNU Emacs and GNU Guile, and a maintainer of GDB, the GNU Debugger. He is one of the original designers of the Subversion version control system. Jim now works on Firefox’s web developer tools for Mozilla.

Jason Orendorff hacks C++ for Mozilla, where he is module owner of the JavaScript engine that's in Firefox. He is an active member of the Nashville developer community and an occasional organizer of homegrown tech events. He is interested in grammar, baking, time travel, and helping people learn about complicated topics.

Paperback: 622 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (December 21, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1491927283
ISBN-13: 978-1491927281
Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 0.9 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 23 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #77,057 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #31 in Books > Textbooks > Computer Science > Object-Oriented Software Design
- #71 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Object-Oriented Design
- #274 in Books > Textbooks > Computer Science > Programming Languages

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Paul Jackson

pj@usa.net

November 25, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I've just begun reading this book. It's quite readable (for a serious programming language book), by a couple of people with a depth of history with Rust and with a long history in other serious systems programming projects.

Earlier today I went looking for my first "Rust book", as Rust is at the top of my list as the next computer language that I want to learn. I started back in the 1970's with FORTRAN on CDC servers, and then with C inside Bell Labs on PDP 8's and 11's. Kernighan and Ritchie's original 1978 "C Programming Language" is the oldest "classic" language book on my shelf, which, like this Rust book, I purchased shortly after it was published.

Hopefully I will remember to return to this review, once I have gotten further into it. But so far, it's looking like a potential "classic."

Update #1: I've gotten a quarter of the way into the book. It's most excellent so far, combining a rare mix of a readable, conversational style with a coherent organization and meticulous accuracy both in the detail and in the conceptual, by a couple of authors who know their stuff, both Rust and systems programming. Unless the authors are the 1 in a 1000 who write polished prose in the first draft, there's the mark of some dang good editing here too.

Update #2: This book (at least the Kindle version I'm reading) lacks a Table of Contents, which I miss. The book is quite well organized, by chapter and subchapter, so I'm not sure why there is no Table of Contents. Perhaps the hardcopy edition will have such, but the "location" rather than "page number" positioning of a Kindle book makes a Table of Contents more difficult?

Update #3: Oops - sorry - there is a table of contents in the Kindle version. It doesn't appear as part of the inline text such as after the title and copyright pages, before the Introduction. Rather it's a special Kindle accessible table of contents (look for the 3 horizontal bar menu pull down icon, near the upper left), which you can access from any "page" in the book.

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B. Hughes

Excellent deep-dive into a complex language

January 17, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Outstanding deep coverage of a complex language that is not easy to learn. I started learning Rust by reading the online documentation, but found the explanations in this book far more approachable, especially on the Rust-unique topics of lifetimes, borrowing, moves, etc. I also hugely appreciated the author's careful attention to showing memory layout of various data structures. Even though these are behind-the-scenes details to some extent, understanding memory layout provides a lot of context to how some of these structures work, particularly when you start talking about the types of references and slices, etc.

The chapter on concurrency, which really showcases the power of Rust's memory safety semantics, was probably the most illuminating. I remember the "ahah" moment I had learning about Elixir's concurrent data pipelines with channels, yet Rust supports this just as easily - and several other concurrency models to boot.

Just about my only criticism is that I thought the chapter on Generics could have used more and simpler examples, to build a better mental model of how they work. I still feel a bit weak on some of the more complex generic type definitions, and will have to read a bit more about this. This and a few other areas lead me to believe that this book is probably better approached by someone with an extensive background in systems programming (particularly with C++), which I do not really have (have only used C++ at a basic level years ago).

Highly recommended to anyone making a serious attempt at learning Rust - a seriously impressive language that has a lot of promise at modernizing systems programming.

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Ville Peurala

Excellent overview of Rust

December 13, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This book gives the reader a broad overview of Rust’s concepts and has plenty of good code examples. This is not for beginners; you need significant experience in programming in order to understand the book, and preferably some C/C++ experience. But for an experienced, professional programmer interested in Rust, this is probably the best place to start.

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Dustin J. Mitchell

For Sytems Programmers who want to learn Rust

January 20, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

O'Reilly has a reputation for putting out substantially higher-quality books than most other publishers in this genre, and this book is a shining example. The text is comprehensive without being exhaustive. The examples are well-designed, and the concepts they embody carefully explained. There's just enough humor to make an engaging read cover-to-cover, while maintaining a high level of rigor and professionalism.

It's important to note that this is *not* a book for the novice programmer. It's a book for someone who knows one or more *other* languages well, and wants to start using Rust to build applications. Since Rust is designed for systems programmers, many of the comparisons are to other systems languages such as C, C++, and Java.

Compared to languages like Go or Python, Rust can be a bit adversarial for the beginner -- what experienced rusaceans refer to as "fighting with the type checker". Most of the reference material available online either assumes familiarity with Rust's checks, or explains it using formal rules. Neither approach is particularly helpful when you're fighting. Jim and Jason explain type and borrow checking from a practical perspective, highlighting a few common design patterns and how they are implemented in Rust (or why they are difficult to implement in rust).

I've been hacking away in Rust for a year or so now, writing toys and fiddling with Rust features, but only having finished this book do I feel like I could successfully design and build a large application in Rust.

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Most recent customer reviews

J. Perez

Easy to follow to but also dense in matterial

I haven't finished reading it, I don't seem to have a lot of time lately but the book is dense and is able to delivered the material in an easy to understand manner followed by...Read more

Published 6 days ago

PO8

*The* Rust book

I'm using this as a course text at my University. Fantastic level of coverage, mixing clear detailed examples with principles and theory. Great writing style.Read more

Published 1 month ago

J.G.

Essential

I never write reviews, but I just have to in order to show my gratitude for this amazing book - it really helped deepen my understanding of Rust.Read more

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William Bryan Gilbert

I've read this book cover to cover and thoroughly enjoyed the authors' writing style and I feel that the ...

The only book I've pre-ordered in a long, long time, and it is more than worth it. I've read this book cover to cover and thoroughly enjoyed the authors' writing style and I feel...Read more

Published 1 month ago

Tom Gundersen

Great introduction to Rust

Best introduction to rust I have read. Though could have spent even more time explaining lifetimes and gone into even more details about every edge-case, even if this is just an...Read more

Published 1 month ago

Sverre Johann Bjørke

Five Stars

Best programming book I have read.

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EAL

An excellent guide to Rust for the experienced developer.

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Cliente Amazon

Five Stars

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Published 2 months ago

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It sparkles with new, interesting ideas

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So far so good, I'll update when I have read the whole ...

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