Rust Tutorial

Master Rust from scratch with our comprehensive, interactive curriculum — 50 lessons from Beginner to Advanced.

Learn Rust from scratch — ownership, borrowing, structs, enums, traits, generics, lifetimes, iterators and concurrency — free interactive lessons.

Part of the free Rust course at LearnCodingFast — hands-on lessons with examples you run in your browser, plus practice exercises and a quick quiz.

Start with Lesson 1 and build real skills step by step — at your own pace.

Lessons in this course

• Introduction to Rust — Install Rust, run your first program with Cargo, and see why Rust exists
• Variables & Mutability — Understand immutable-by-default variables, mut, constants, and shadowing
• Data Types — Integers, floats, booleans, chars, tuples, and arrays in a statically typed language
• Functions — Define functions, pass parameters, and return values with expressions
• Control Flow — Branch with if/else and loop with loop, while, and for
• Ownership — Rust's signature feature — how memory is managed without a garbage collector
• References & Borrowing — Borrow values with & and &mut without giving up ownership
• Slices — Reference contiguous sections of collections without copying them
• Structs — Group related data together and attach behaviour with methods
• Enums & Pattern Matching — Model values that can be one of several variants and match on them
• Option & Result — Handle absence and failure safely without null or exceptions
• Vectors — Store growable lists of values with Vec<T>
• Strings — Work with String and &str, and understand UTF-8 text in Rust
• HashMaps — Map keys to values for fast lookups with HashMap<K, V>
• Error Handling (the ? operator) — Propagate recoverable errors cleanly with Result and the ? operator
• Modules & Crates — Organise code with modules, paths, and external crates from crates.io
• Generics — Write code that works over many types without duplication
• Traits — Define shared behaviour and program to interfaces with trait bounds
• Lifetimes — Tell the compiler how long references are valid to prevent dangling pointers
• Closures — Anonymous functions that capture their environment — Fn, FnMut, FnOnce
• Iterators — Process sequences lazily with map, filter, collect, and the Iterator trait
• Smart Pointers (Box, Rc, RefCell) — Heap allocation, shared ownership, and interior mutability
• Concurrency & Threads — Spawn threads and pass messages safely with Rust's fearless concurrency
• Cargo, Crates & the Module Workflow — cargo new/build/run/test, Cargo.toml, and organising code into modules
• Operators & Expressions — Arithmetic, overflow handling, comparison, and everything-is-an-expression
• Tuples & Arrays — Fixed-size groupings — destructuring tuples and indexing arrays safely
• String Formatting (format!, println!) — {} vs {:?}, width/precision/alignment, and named & inline args
• Pattern Matching (match, if let, while let) — Exhaustive match, ranges, guards, bindings, and let-else
• Type Conversions (From, Into, as, TryFrom) — Cast with as, convert with From/Into, and fallibly with TryFrom
• Constants & Statics — const vs static, const fn, and compile-time evaluation
• Comparison & Ordering (PartialEq, Ord) — Derive equality and ordering, sort with keys, and why floats are PartialOrd
• Checkpoint: Rust Basics — Combine parsing, sorting and formatting in a build — then a quiz
• Trait Objects & dyn — Dynamic dispatch with dyn Trait and Box<dyn Trait> vs generics
• Associated Types & Trait Bounds — type Item in traits, implementing Iterator, and where clauses
• Derive Macros (#[derive]) — What Debug, Clone, Copy, PartialEq, Hash and Default generate for you
• Operator Overloading (std::ops) — Implement Add, Mul and Index for your own types
• The Default & Clone Traits — Default::default(), struct update syntax, and Clone vs Copy
• Testing (#[test], cargo test) — Write unit tests with assert_eq!, #[should_panic], and cfg(test)
• File I/O (std::fs) — Read and write files with fs, BufReader, and the ? operator
• Command-Line Args (std::env) — Read args and environment variables to build CLI programs
• Checkpoint: Traits & Generics — Build a shapes program with traits and trait objects — then a quiz
• More Collections: VecDeque, BTreeMap & BinaryHeap — Pick the right collection — deques, sorted maps, heaps, and sets
• Declarative Macros (macro_rules!) — Write your own macros with matchers, repetition, and hygiene
• The Drop Trait & RAII — Run cleanup automatically at scope end — Rust's no-GC resource model
• The Newtype Pattern & Type Aliases — Add type safety with wrapper structs and the orphan-rule workaround
• Cow: Clone-on-Write — Avoid allocations by borrowing until you actually need to own
• Error Handling with Box<dyn Error> — Mix error types with ? and a boxed trait object, including in main()
• unsafe Rust — Raw pointers and the five unsafe superpowers — used soundly
• Checkpoint: Systems Rust — Combine a newtype, a macro and Box<dyn Error> in a build — then a quiz
• Capstone: A CLI Tool — Bring it all together by building a real command-line application
• Async Rust with Tokio — async/await, futures, the Tokio runtime, spawning tasks, and channels
• Web Framework with Axum — Build an HTTP server with Axum — routers, handlers, extractors, and state
• Database Access with sqlx — Compile-time-checked SQL, connection pools, FromRow mapping, and transactions
• FFI & C Interop — Call C from Rust and Rust from C with extern, repr(C), and the FFI types
• Serialization with Serde — Derive Serialize/Deserialize and work with JSON and other formats
• Error Handling with thiserror & anyhow — Ergonomic library and application errors beyond Box<dyn Error>
• Send, Sync & Shared-State Concurrency — The thread-safety marker traits and Arc<Mutex<T>> shared state
• Procedural & Derive Macros — Write your own derive, attribute and function-like macros with syn and quote
• Benchmarking with Criterion — Statistical benchmarks with cargo bench, black_box and HTML reports
• Cargo Workspaces & Publishing — Multi-crate workspaces and publishing to crates.io with cargo publish

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