Learning Rust

After five years of retirement, I'm taking my second stab at learning the Rust programming language. The first time, a few years ago, I worked through Tim McNamara's Rust In Action book. At the time I was absorbing the knowledge but not really reinforcing it in my mind very well. This time, I'm using The Rust Programming Book, available for free online. It's a nice hands-on introduction to the language, and includes good programming practices as well, such as separation of concerns.

I'm starting out by creating a file viewer program, which I've awkwardly named fileinfo. It's a console app, and I'm using RustRover from JetBrains as my editor. Microsoft's Visual Studio had been my editor of choice for many years as I usually worked in a Windows development environment. Visual Studio doesn't have a great Rust story, but Visual Studio Code (vscode) does. I did try vscode at first, but ran into annoyances getting it all to work, and although I think it's a great platform, I decided to try Rust Rover when I heard JetBrains had a dedicated Rust IDE. Rust Rover is free for non-commercial use for a year, so that gives me plenty of time to decide if I want to use it long-term.

Although I intend fileinfo (on github) to grow into a powerful viewer of PE and ELF binary files, and possibly other file types, I'm using it to learn Rust as a starting point. I've already reversed course on the use of a GUI library, and am sticking with the console output for now.