
Ask HN: A Rust Book - ci5er
It&#x27;s that time of year where I do something to stretch myself. It&#x27;s been long enough since I&#x27;ve written a book that I&#x27;ve almost forgotten how much I hated it.<p>I&#x27;m thinking of a writing a Rust book in 3-ish sections:
  - Get Started + a few tutorials
  - A light-weight referenc-ey take on the language, much like the old K&amp;R C book (which I thought was truly excellent) with maybe a few more definitional or explanatory asides like one would see in the Qt documentation.
  - A large project<p>Here&#x27;s where the question part comes in. The project I do for myself usually have to do with physical simulations, rendering, agent-based simulations (economics, oil market supply-and-demand lumpiness, markets) or something like a small-worlds analysis of metabolic pathways in a liver cell. Or something.<p>I&#x27;m not really a web-&#x2F;mobile- CRUD app guy, and something with numerics like a singular value decomposition (SVD) calculation is more my speed.<p>And Rust is pretty cool for this stuff because it&#x27;s pretty speedy, typed and safe.<p>But as I&#x27;m a weird guy, coming up with something that might be of general interest &quot;to the people&quot; is stumping me a bit.<p>Which is where y&#x27;all come in.<p>Q1: What kind of (maybe computationally intensive) type of project would a larger population of people than me find of general interest?<p>Q2: Most of my prior efforts would be published by Springer Verlag or Morgan Kauffman and the like. Should this be an O&#x27;Reilly type thing? A gitbook type thing? Both? Neither? Something else?<p>Thanks!
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valarauca1
I would say building a simple HTTPd server would be something a lot of people
could get behind.

Naturally it wouldn't follow the entire reference and specification but just
getting it off the ground handling gets/posts in a psuedo standard conforming
way would be a lot.

Also this would cover a lot of the basics of OS interaction, multi-threading,
etc.

That's my 2cents. I would love to see more rust books come out. I'll happily
buy them. I use the language on and off (primarily jumping between C, Java and
Rust (former 2 for work)). Rust's high level programming is very nice and
while Java does support _some_ of the things rust does, its not as clean as
Rust's syntax.

~~~
ci5er
Really? Even if you go back to the old NCSA httpd, your looking at at
something less than 200 lines.

Do you think it should be an entire Apache-type get-up, or just briefly as one
of the examples in Section #1?

I _was_ thinking of going Qt binding in Rust, and a book about that, but ...
it doesn't really do anything other than say "Here's how you do C++ interfaces
in Rust".

I'll think about the broader issue which you point to -- a good-ish service on
a good-ish service bus. Maybe like you would see with Scala on a ZeroQ thing,
do you think?

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gaalze
Make it funny:

[http://learnyouahaskell.com/](http://learnyouahaskell.com/)

[http://learnyousomeerlang.com/](http://learnyousomeerlang.com/)

[http://learnyouanagda.liamoc.net/](http://learnyouanagda.liamoc.net/)

[http://landoflisp.com/](http://landoflisp.com/)

[http://realmofracket.com/about.html](http://realmofracket.com/about.html)

don't skimp on the cool simulation stuff!

~~~
ci5er
Hmmm. I do like the "Learn X the Hard Way" by Zed stuff. And I do like the in-
page edit-compile-respond of the Rust-by-example book.

That said: I'm not really a funny guy like the Perl people or Randall Munroe.
Do you think a co-author would help with a more general audience?

~~~
gaalze
funny is what you make it. absurd, depressing, uplifting, idiotic.

I consider this the best comedy on the planet:
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2396224/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2396224/)

I also like the stuff by this guy brad neely:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WCiBPjckTg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WCiBPjckTg)

don't let other people tell you what's funny or you'll be watching carlos
mencia and everybody loves raymond.

