MICHA.ELMUELLER

I spent a couple months of 2018 diving into Rust, a modern low-level programming language with high-level language features — functional programming, asynchronous programming, closures, ….

The language is a bit out of the family of languages that I usually work with and so a lot of stuff had to be learnt.
Also, I characterize Rust as an expert language. It is very explicit since one of its design goals was to not have hidden performance costs of functions without the programmer being aware of it.

I learnt the language the same way that I learnt stuff during university and it has proven to work very well for me:

• I read a fundamental book on the topic from cover to cover and made sure that I understood every single line in the book. The book was “The Rust Programming Language”.
• After having read a large part of the book, I summarized each chapter that I had read so far in my own words on paper. To me it’s important to not immediately summarize each chapter after I’ve finished it, but rather gain an elementary idea of the domain first.

  For this summary I re-read each chapter and wrote up the most important things. During this “second reading” I very often suddenly understand things that I haven’t before or suddenly notice some detail that I haven’t before. Also it often suddenly clicks and I see the connection to something that appears only later in the book.

• I immersed myself into the community, subscribing to the r/rust subreddit and reading the weekly “This Week in Rust“.
• I watched a number of YouTube talks by the leading people in the field.
• I coded up an own project: this was a problem that I faced and Rust was a perfect fit. The project was definitely challenging in its goal and I had to use a number of different language features. So it was no easy walk, but the result took use of a broad set of features the language offers. I open-sourced the project and published it as a package to cargo (the Rust package manager).
• I provided Pull Requests for projects which I respect which also use Rust. The feedback was really helpful and I think this is an excellent way to learn a language. One basically gets a mentor and feedback for free. In programming languages there are often idiomatic ways and patterns to do things and this is a handy way to get to know them.

  Also, while fixing bugs for those projects I had to read the source code of bigger Rust projects. This way I saw the idiomatic way to structure/design large projects in this language.

I would say the idea of summarizing the chapters of the book in my own words is the most important idea from the list above. To me, the core idea is that it helps me find my own view on the material. It’s especially important to me that this process is done without any computer, I’m too distracted otherwise.