Ask HN: What are the best resources to learn Rust in 2025? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the best resources to learn Rust in 2025?

7 points_Crownwell7 comments

The Rust book is a great place to start. Free and pretty short! After that I’d get a project focused book like zero to production rust, or command line rust.

Lastly I recommend reading Programming Rust. It is long but extremely thorough! You’ll understand the language at a deep level. Good luck and have fun!

Maybe controversial, but if you already know how to program then doing a small project with a LLM is the fastest and most efficient way. Ask it to implement something, then go read the documentation to understand what is going on. After you got the hang of it, try to implement something yourself and ask the LLM to rewrite it in an idiomatic way.

This worked for me after several failed attempts at learning Clojure in the pre-LLM era, when I had to spend ten minutes googling for things for every minute of actual coding. It's a fantastic way to quickly get a hold of the most common library functions and patterns.

And for those who say that LLMs aren't perfect or can't be trusted: who cares. At this stage just focus on being able to stand on your own, only then work on perfecting the craft.

This is the way. I’m learning Haskell right now like this kind of. I’m reading through a book, coding examples and exploring further as I go, and using an LLM to fill in the gaps / parse the esoteric compiler errors. It’s insanely efficient.

I started learning Rust just last week. I went through the basic syntax, watched a few youtube videos, read some blog posts and then decided to build something real even if I didn’t understand everything yet.

I ended up making a CLI tool to generate seed phrases for bitcoin wallets. This helped me learn concepts way faster. I did use Claude a lot for help but that’s part of how I learn right now.

That said I’m planning to rely less and less on LLMs as I get more comfortable with the language and I think if you’re already familiar with another language this approach might work well for you too.

Despite its age I still think that "A Half-Hour to Learn Rust" is an excellent starting point: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust

(Self-reply as I'm outside the edit-window)

I think Amos's title here is a little tongue-in-cheek by the way - it's more like a half-hour to skim through it, but with this at hand you'll be in a much better place to start writing some toy rust programs before you dive into more in-depth books like "The Rust Programming Language".

I currently have (and like) that and the O'Reilly book "Programming Rust", and found them sufficient for initial exploration. I'm now trying to internalise the contents of "Effective Rust" (also O'Reilly) and "Rust for Rustaceans" from Free Starch Press - the latter of which I would say is the most advanced of these.

There's still plenty I don't understand, but that's more about the minimal amount of time I've spent dabbling rather than any deficiency in these resources (so far as a dabbler can tell).

Learn how to learn first, it's simply the MOST important thing you can master.

After that, every problem is a nail.

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