Step-by-step guides for setup, your first projects, interview prep, and contributing to open source.
Install Rust and get your editor ready in under 30 minutes.
Download and install the official Rust toolchain manager from rustup.rs.
Run `rustc --version` and `cargo --version` in your terminal.
Install rust-analyzer for VS Code, Cursor, or Neovim for autocomplete and inline errors.
Create a project with `cargo new hello_rust` and run `cargo run`.
A structured first week: read, practice, and join the community.
Read chapters 1–4 of The Rust Book
Covers installation, guessing game, common concepts, and ownership basics.
Hands-on drills that reinforce each chapter concept.
Keep the cheat sheet open while coding — you'll reference it constantly.
Ask questions on users.rust-lang.org or the official Discord.
Build a real command-line program with Cargo — from project layout to parsing args and handling errors.
Understand projects, dependencies, tests, and `cargo run` before writing your tool.
Clone the Command-Line Rust repo
Follow along with Ken Youens-Clark's project-based guide — each chapter builds a Unix-style tool.
Start with a small `grep`- or `wc`-style binary using clap for argument parsing.
Catch unidiomatic patterns early — essential habit for any CLI you share or open-source.
Go from async basics to a production-ready HTTP service with Axum and real-world deployment patterns.
Grasp futures, async/await, and Tokio fundamentals before building an API.
Build routes, extractors, and JSON handlers — the modern Rust web stack.
Practice spawning tasks and async I/O that Axum builds on.
Learn testing, configuration, observability, and deployment for a service you'd run in prod.
A focused seven-day plan to sharpen fundamentals, practice problems, and tricky Rust semantics before interviews.
Review ownership and lifetimes
Re-read The Rust Book chapters 4–10 — the core of most Rust interview questions.
Practice writing idiomatic solutions with mentor feedback on each submission.
Test yourself on surprising ownership, lifetime, and type-system edge cases.
100 coding problems and 120 theoretical questions covering traits, async, and more.
Short puzzles that expose gaps in your mental model — great last-minute prep.
Follow the full Interview Prep path
See all curated resources in order — including Crust of Rust and reading production code.
Learn to read real Rust codebases, navigate tooling, and find your first meaningful open-source contribution.
Go-to-definition, inline types, and diagnostics make reading unfamiliar code much faster.
A well-structured, widely admired codebase — start with `cargo build` and read `main.rs`.
Jon Gjengset walks through real code — lifetimes, iterators, and patterns you'll see in the wild.
Recognize idioms in the code you read — builders, newtypes, RAII, and error handling.
Filter rust-analyzer or ripgrep issues labeled `good first issue` or `E-easy` and ask on Discord if stuck.