What You Should Know Now — and What's Next

What You Should Know Now

• Core syntax: bindings and mutability, scalar and compound types, expressions, control flow, and functions
• Ownership, borrowing, slices, and lifetimes — and how to read the borrow checker's errors instead of fighting them
• Structs, enums, pattern matching, and methods
• Idiomatic error handling with Option, Result, and ?
• Generics, traits, trait objects, closures, and iterators
• Smart pointers, threads, channels, and shared state with Arc and Mutex
• Async Rust with Tokio, declarative and procedural macros, and when (and how) to use unsafe
• Building, testing, benchmarking, and deploying a real service with Axum and SQLx

What Should You Learn Next?

• Systems programming in depth — embedded Rust (no_std), writing an interpreter, or contributing to a Rust command-line tool you already use.
• WebAssembly — compile Rust to Wasm with wasm-pack and call it from a JavaScript front end.
• A related language — C++ if you'll work on large existing native codebases (many ideas, such as RAII and move semantics, map directly), or Go for a simpler, garbage-collected take on building network services.
• Read real Rust code — the standard library's source and popular crates such as ripgrep, serde, and tokio are some of the best teaching material available.

Build Something

Pick a project idea that solves an actual problem you personally have — and build it as a small Rust command-line tool or service, with tests alongside it from the start and cargo clippy in your routine.