I completed reading through Programming Rust by Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff and Leonora F. S. Tindall (Amazon). I feel like I spent too much of 2025 flitting between new concepts, and I missed the structured and concerted learning from university. A goal for 2026 was to switch from breadth-first to depth-first learning; and to be honest, I miss reading textbooks! I read this cover to cover, and overall I really enjoyed it. In particular:

• I really enjoyed the sections on the Rust borrow checker and semantics of ownership. The diagrams were especially helpful in understanding the memory layout of Rust values and types.
• The illustrative code examples were a bit hit-and-miss for me: I thought they were often quite bland or didn’t quite demonstrate the topic at hand very well.
• Exercises would have been a nice touch, but there is a plethora of exercise ideas floating through the ether in any case.
• I found the asynchronous programming section to be a bit of a mess. However, that could well be due to my lack of experience with async programming as a whole. In which case, I have much to make up for!

All in all, I found it quite an enjoyable read, and feel that I’ve got a better handle on Rust programming. I’m looking forward to picking up and reading through more textbooks this year!