any suggestions for exercises that drill this in? I'm going through the linked list book but it's still not completely transparent for me.
1. If you are feeling stuck, please reach out on users.rust-lang.org or discord.gg/rust-lang. We're here to help!
2. If you're feeling really stuck, maybe take a break and come back to Rust in a few months. A number of people have given up on Rust in frustration, came back after a significant amount of time, and then said "why did I think that was so hard before?"
3. Don't worry about a few calls to clone when you're getting started; it's better to have a working program that does some extra copying than it is to not have a program at all.
4. Especially when starting out, you almost always want structs to own their data. Don't use references as struct members unless you're absolutely sure that's what you want. Advice #3 helps with this.
5. I think one of the biggest mindsets that can set you up for failure with Rust is "The compiler says no, how do I get it to do what I want anyway" instead of "The compiler says no, what is it telling me, and how can I work with it instead?" Especially if you come from an OO heavy background, you may need to change the patterns that you reach for initially. Yes, you can write any style in any language, but Rust pushes you towards its idioms much more strongly than other languages do.
For drills, I recommend exercism.io in practice mode (mentor/student ratio is pretty bad). After working on your own solution for a while, then checking how the others solved it... priceless. Somebody almost always figured out an objectively better solution.
Why not plug the rust channel on Matrix?
* Things that are run by the project
* Things that I use
I have no idea if the Matrix channel is any good or not, so I cannot recommend it.