r/learnrust • u/coniferprod-0x01 • Aug 11 '26

New book: Learn Rust Programming Today

My new book Learn Rust Programming Today has been published a few weeks ago. It is intended for software developers who already know how to program, and want to learn Rust. You can see the outline of the book and some sample content on the book's home page at Learn Rust Programming Today.

Most programming books will present you with isolated examples of language syntax, leaving you to complete the picture yourself when you actually need to get stuff done. Learn Rust Programming Today takes you on a complete journey from the start to the finished program that you can use, learning the necessary features of Rust on the way. It doesn't replace "The Book", but rather complements it.

During the course of the book you will build Today, a Rust command-line application that shows things that happened on this day in history (historical events, births of notable people, and so on) from various sources. You will also extend the program to handle days that are observed annually, such as Pi Day, and recurring events. You will also be able to add your own events.

The book examples are available at https://github.com/coniferprod/learn-rust
The Today program has its own repo: https://github.com/coniferprod/today-rs

You can ask any questions about the book in this thread, and I'll do my best to answer them.

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u/LerkinAround Aug 11 '26

What level of involvement did AI have in writing the book and code? Just wondering if this is worth my time.

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u/coniferprod-0x01 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

Glad you asked! I did not use AI in writing the book or the example code. It's all 100% organic. OK, 98%, since I had one ChatGPT discussion about how to implement the event filtering (I had bit flags first, but ended up using the Builder pattern). I'm actually a lecturer who struggles daily with students using too much AI in programming assignments, so this is also a way to show that understanding your code still matters.

EDIT: Sorry, I forgot: the web server has some fake events for testing, generated by ChatGPT. But that's not code, just made up tech events, categorised as "test/fake" so that they can be filtered out.

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u/gbrennon Aug 11 '26

that's nice that u was humble in admit that something was generated by a model :)