Welcome

Dear Reader,

Thanks for taking a chance and buying this early release book on the Rust programming language and the internals of computer systems. I hope that you'll be rewarded with a fun, informative read!

Part 1: Rust Language Distinctives will provide a quick-fire introduction to the Rust language by working through projects that begin to introduce concepts that are expanded upon later in the book, such as implementing a File API.

Part 2: Systems Programming from the Ground Up (Almost) will shift your focus towards the computer. You will learn how data is represented at various levels between the application, operating system and hardware. Rust language features will be introduced as required.

A note about Chapter 6: This chapter should be considered a work in progress. It covers lots of ground. Readers progress from learning what a pointer is to benchmarking memory allocations with system utilities for Linux. Some of the explanations are terse... perhaps too terse.

We believe that the content is interesting and relevant to professional programmers, but are considering how it should be expanded and refactored to be most relevant to the book's readers. The author and the editorial team are very interested in your views about what works and what needs more work.