Book review: Rust in action

content/reviews/books/rust-in-action.md

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+title = "Rust In Action - T.S. McNamara"
+date = 2020-04-28
+
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["books", "reviews", "rust", "t s mcnamara"]
++++
+
+[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45731908-rust-in-action):
+Rust in Action introduces the Rust programming language by exploring numerous
+systems programming concepts and techniques. You'll be learning Rust by delving
+into how computers work under the hood. You'll find yourself playing with
+persistent storage, memory, networking and even tinkering with CPU
+instructions. The book takes you through using Rust to extend other
+applications and teaches you tricks to write blindingly fast code. You'll also
+discover parallel and concurrent programming. Filled to the brim with
+real-life use-cases and scenarios, you'll go beyond the Rust syntax and see
+what Rust has to offer in real-world use cases.
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+{{ stars(stars=4) }}
+
+{% note() %}
+The version of this book I got is not the final version, it's part of
+Manning Early Access Program, which allows people to read and participate in
+"constructing" a book. A lot of things may change in the final version, so be
+aware of this.
+{% end %}
+
+I have to say, I don't buy the "introduces the Rust programming language" part
+of the description. A few points seem related to people that already have some
+knowledge about the language, and jumping straight to some non-trivial problem
+appears to skip a few "introduction" points, in my opinion.
+
+One have to ask what "in Action" means. Sure, you'll write your one RFC
+754 for dealing with floating points, so you can understand why some floating
+values get to 6.000000000001, and while you won't ever write your own floating
+point processor, you have to ask yourself: What is being explained about Rust
+here? Sometimes, the problems feel more like "I want to solve this" than "I
+want to explain this feature of the language", while it should be the other
+way around.
+
+Another confusing point: The output of a program appears before its code.
+While not that weird, you end up with some sections showing the output,
+explaining a bit and then, way later, you get the code what actually produces
+that output. I remember reading a bit about the output and some discussion
+about it and I got really confused about what was producing that output.
+
+The Rust part seems a bit out-of-date, too. There are some `extern crate`,
+which is optional at this point. Updating the code to reflect the latest
+version of the language (the syntax, that is) would be better.
+
+On the other hand, I have to give the author the props for managing to explain
+things _really well_. Why you should use something, how can you apply
+different things to the same data and so on. That's the book greatest
+strength.
+
+So, is it a bad book? Not at all. It has some quirks, but overall is well
+explained and, if you keep an eye on the language from outside, it answers a
+lot of stuff that you won't figure out anywhere else.