Comprehensive Rust 🦀

This repository has the source code for Comprehensive Rust 🦀, a multi-day Rust course developed by the Android team. The course covers all aspects of Rust, from basic syntax to generics and error handling. It also includes deep dives on Android, Chromium, bare-metal, and concurrency.

Read the course at https://google.github.io/comprehensive-rust/.

Course Format and Target Audience

The course is used internally at Google when teaching Rust to experienced software engineers. They typically have a background in C++ or Java.

The course is taught in a classroom setting and we hope it will be useful for others who want to teach Rust to their team. The course will be less useful for self-study since you miss out on the discussions happening in the classroom. You don't see the questions and answers and you don't see the compiler errors we trigger when going through the code samples. We hope to improve on this via speaker notes and by publishing videos.

Press

Articles and blog posts from around the web which cover Comprehensive Rust:

• 2023-09-08: Teaching Rust in 5 days. Comprehensive Rust was used as a base for a 5-day university class on Rust.
• 2023-09-21: Scaling Rust Adoption Through Training. We published a blog post with details on the development of the course.
• 2023-10-02: In Search of Rust Developers, Companies Turn to In-House Training. About how Microsoft, Google, and others are training people in Rust.
• 2024-10-18: Rust Training at Scale | Rust Global @ RustConf 2024. What Google learnt from teaching Comprehensive Rust for more than two years.

Setup

The course is built using a few tools:

• mdbook
• mdbook-svgbob
• mdbook-i18n-helpers and i18n-report
• mdbook-exerciser
• mdbook-course
• mdbook-linkcheck2

First install Rust by following the instructions on https://rustup.rs/. Then clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/google/comprehensive-rust/
cd comprehensive-rust

Then install these tools with:

cargo xtask install-tools

Commands

Here is a summary of the various commands you can run in the project.

Command	Description
cargo install-tools	Install all the tools the project depends on.
cargo serve	Start a web server with the course. You'll find the content on http://localhost:3000. To serve any of the translated versions of the course, add the language flag (--language or -l) followed by xx, where xx is the ISO 639 language code (e.g. cargo xtask serve -l da for the Danish translation).
cargo rust-tests	Test the included Rust snippets.
cargo web-tests	Run the web driver tests in the tests directory.
cargo build-book	Create a static version of the course in the book/ directory. Note that you have to separately build and zip exercises and add them to book/html. To build any of the translated versions of the course, add the language flag (--language or -l) followed by xx, where xx is the ISO 639 language code (e.g. cargo xtask build -l da for the Danish translation). TRANSLATIONS.md contains further instructions.

Note

On Windows, you need to enable symlinks (git config --global core.symlinks true) and Developer Mode.

Note

Previous versions this README recommended that you use cargo xtool <tool>, i.e. cargo xtool install-tools. This causes issues with pre-existing installations of cargo-xtool and is now deprecated.

The new syntax is almost a 1:1 mapping, although cargo xtool build has become cargo build-book to avoid conflicting with the built-in Cargo subcommand.

• cargo xtool build -> cargo build-book
• cargo xtool install-tools -> cargo install-tools
• cargo xtool serve -> cargo serve
• cargo xtool run-tests -> cargo run-tests
• cargo xtool web-tests -> cargo web-tests

Contributing

We would like to receive your contributions. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Contact

For questions or comments, please contact Martin Geisler or start a discussion on GitHub. We would love to hear from you.