I thought the Rust Book was too verbose but I liked Comprehensive Rust: https://google.github.io/comprehensive-rust/
I felt like I understood the stuff in the book based on cursory reading, but I haven't tried to actually use it.
Is knowing C++ a pre-requisite?
You would think they would be smart enough to realize that a language taking X hours to learn is a language flaw not a user flaw, but modern education focuses on specialization talents rather than general intelligence.
I don't think it's much harder than learning C or C++ which are the only comparable mainstream languages.
I run two intermediate programming courses, one where we teach C++, and another where we teach Rust. In the Rust course, by the first week they are writing code and using 3rd party libraries; whereas in the C course we spend a lot of time dealing with linker errors, include errors, segfaults, etc. The learning curve for C/C++ gets steep very fast. But with Rust it's actually quite flat until you have to get into borrowing, and you can even defer that understanding with clone().
By the end of the semester in the C++ course, students' final project is a file server, they can get there in 14 weeks.
In Rust the final project is a server that implements LSP, which also includes an interpreter for a language they design. The submissions for this project are usually much more robust than the submissions for the C++ course, and I would attribute this difference to the designs of the languages.
Writing good software most often is not easy. The learning curve of a particular language usually is only a modest part of what it takes.
1) those who only know java
2) those who know java and were taught C++ by me. The way I teach that course, they are very familiar with pre-modern C++ because we also learn C.
3) those who know java and C++ but they learned it on their own.
It's the last group who has the most trouble. IME the exact issue they struggle with is the idea of shared mutable state. They are accustomed to handing out pointers to mutable state like candy, and they don't worry about race conditions, or all the different kinds of memory errors that can occur and lead to vulnerabilities. They don't write code that is easily refactored, or modular. They have a tendency to put everything into a header or one main.cpp file because they can't really get their head around the linking errors they get.
So when they try to write code this way in Rust, the very first thing they encounter is a borrow error related to their liberal sharing of state, and they can't understand why they can't just write code the way they want because it had been working so well for them before (in their very limited experience).
Pedagogically what I have to do is unteach them all these habits and then rebuild their knowledge from the ground up.
Ah, well, a shame they didn't see the failing tests for the C++ code first ;)
It’s both identical and very different, depending on the level of detail you want to get into. Conceptually, it’s identical. Strictly speaking, the implementations differ in a few key ways.