PNA Rust — Building Blocks 1

Let's learn some building blocks!

Put your other projects and concerns aside. Take a breath and relax. Here are some fun resources for you to explore.

Read all the readings and perform all the exercises.

• Exercise: Write a Good CLI Program. Writing a CLI program in Rust. This is a good warmup to the CLI program you'll be writing in this course, and the techniques used by this author may provide an interesting contrast to those we suggest. Follow along and write the same code. Can you reproduce their results?

• Reading: The Cargo manifest format. A single page in The Cargo Book, this will give you an idea of how your project can be customized a bit if you so choose. This is a page you will come back to repeatedly as a Rust programmer.

• Reading: Cargo environment variables. Also from The Cargo Book, and also a page that you will see many times in the future. Environment variables are one way that it communicates with rustc, allowing it to set the various env! macros at build time, in both your program source code and build scripts. It is also a way for scripts and other systems to communicate to Cargo.

• Reading: Rust API Guidelines: Documentation. The Rust project is opinionated about how Rust source is written. This page is on how to document Rust projects, but the whole book is worth reading. These are written by experienced Rust developers, but are in an incomplete state. Note the GitHub organization it belongs to — rust-lang-nursery. It contains many interesting projects.