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+++ title = "Rust Essentials - Ivo Balbaert" date = 2015-07-02
category = "review"
[taxonomies] tags = ["books", "en-au", "ivo balbaert"] +++ {{ stars(stars=3) }}
Rust is a language that intrigues me. It seems it has a good deal of protections and clever structures to prevent problems that other languages have. And it usually outperforms C (at least, in the Euler tests).
But I really never really "got" the language just reading Rust By Example and The Rust Programming Language. So I bought this book.
Sure, it goes slowly to teach you the light intricacies of the language, but it never, in any point, goes deep into it, which is really annoying. It tries to pick a subject to tell how to code in Rust (using a theoretical game), but it never completes it. You never see the final product of all the stuff it was just explained. And some examples have nothing to do with it.
The problem with shallowness of the book gets exponentially worse when talking to complex subjects, like threading and unsafe blocks. Because it never goes too deep, you end up handing with simple threads the basically just add numbers, nothing something so complex that would actually require threads in the first place.
Also, it seems the book was not reviewed. There is one paragraph saying one thing (traits can't have implementations), just to, a few paragraphs later, showing exactly the opposite (like a trait with an implementation). There are two "We'll see X in the next section" with said next section just below it.
It's an ok introduction to Rust, but it goes short in several places.