What is the best way to pick up Rust and its best practices as of today? References welcome (thanks in advance!)
Doing it the "basic" way is sooooooo much easier, which is important while learning. Nine times out of ten it will be fast/efficient enough anyway.
After you've got a handle on it with a few non-trivial programs under your belt, then start tightening up once you have the necessary context and familiarity.
While the Rust syntax around lifetimes can be confusing, The Rust Book does a decent guide describing what lifetimes are. Reading up on Modern C++ practices and language constructs actually helps with Rust too.
The rustdoc book doesn't have a lot of examples of the full markdown support for documenting your code unfortunately. Browsing through std helps.
Cargo rocks, and it's easy to spin up a new project. One thing I did was create a few new ones just for concepts that were difficult to me at first.
It's a pretty quick read and gives you a good handle on Rust fairly quickly.
You can read the reference book, and even a few other ones, but still not being able to have a sufficient/solid grasp of the language. I couldn't find good material past the beginner stage (I consider Rust for Rustaceans advanced).
My personal advice is to find some project you'd like to implement, and practice a lot, or contribute to small projects you like, without worrying about best practices.
There have been definitely many moments where I wanted to close the Rust chapter, and that's why I think it's more important than other languages to keep the motivation high, which I think is best achieved by working on projects.
Rustlings is nice but... not stimulating.