The Rusty Your learning path 🗺️
Twenty-eight bite-sized lessons across five levels, starting before code even begins. Each one has plain-English explanations, runnable examples, and exercises with hidden solutions. Finish a lesson, hit “Mark lesson complete,” and watch the bar fill up.
Level 0 Foundations 🌍 - never programmed? Start here. Otherwise, skim or skip
How a Computer Thinks
CPU, memory, binary, and what a program really is. No magic, just a very fast kitchen.
The Programmer's Toolbox
Terminals, paths, editors, libraries, and the vocabulary of the trade.
Version Control & Git
The industry's time machine: commits, branches, GitHub, and fearless experiments.
Standards & Conventions
Naming, formatting, semantic versioning, licenses, DRY, KISS, and YAGNI.
The Programmer's Mindset
Debugging method, asking great questions, escaping tutorial hell, and Rust's culture.
Level 1 Sprout 🌱 - total beginner, zero experience assumed
Hello, World!
Your first program, what a compiler actually is, and meeting Cargo.
Variables & Mutability
Labeled boxes for data, and why Rust locks the lid by default.
Data Types
Numbers, text, booleans, tuples, and arrays: Rust's raw ingredients.
Functions
Reusable recipes: inputs, outputs, and Rust's expression trick.
Control Flow
Making decisions with if, repeating with loops and ranges.
Level 2 The Rust Way 🔧 - the ideas that make Rust, Rust
Ownership
The big idea. One owner per value, and no garbage collector needed.
Borrowing & References
Lending values without giving them away, and the two sacred rules.
Structs & Methods
Bundle related data into your own types, then teach them tricks.
Enums & Pattern Matching
Option, match, and the end of null-pointer crashes.
Collections
Growable lists, owned text, and key-value maps: Vec, String, HashMap.
Error Handling
Result, the ? operator, and failing honestly.
Level 3 Power Tools 🚀 - advanced Rust, gently
Traits & Generics
Shared behavior and flexible code: Rust's answer to interfaces.
Lifetimes
The infamous 'a, demystified with a library card.
Closures & Iterators
Tiny functions in variables, and lazy assembly lines for data.
Smart Pointers
Box, Rc, and RefCell: ownership power tools.
Fearless Concurrency
Threads, channels, and shared state, all checked by the compiler.
Cargo, Modules & Tests
Organize, test, and ship real projects, plus where to go next.
Level 4 Deep Cuts 🕳️ - graduate electives: the topics behind the curtain
Strings, For Real This Time
UTF-8, bytes vs chars, why you cannot index a string, and the methods that matter.
Pattern Matching Mastery
Guards, or-patterns, @ bindings, let else, and matches!.
Error Handling Like a Pro
Design real error types with thiserror and anyhow.
Async Rust
async, await, futures, and tokio: waiting on thousands of things at once.
Unsafe & FFI
What unsafe really permits, calling C, and safe wrappers around danger.
Performance & Profiling
Release builds, honest measurement, allocation costs, and zero-cost abstractions.