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Ask HN: A Rust Book

7 points by ci5er ↗ HN
It's that time of year where I do something to stretch myself. It's been long enough since I've written a book that I've almost forgotten how much I hated it.

I'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&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

Here'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.

I'm not really a web-/mobile- CRUD app guy, and something with numerics like a singular value decomposition (SVD) calculation is more my speed.

And Rust is pretty cool for this stuff because it's pretty speedy, typed and safe.

But as I'm a weird guy, coming up with something that might be of general interest "to the people" is stumping me a bit.

Which is where y'all come in.

Q1: What kind of (maybe computationally intensive) type of project would a larger population of people than me find of general interest?

Q2: Most of my prior efforts would be published by Springer Verlag or Morgan Kauffman and the like. Should this be an O'Reilly type thing? A gitbook type thing? Both? Neither? Something else?

Thanks!

6 comments

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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?

gaalze
Make it funny:

http://learnyouahaskell.com/

http://learnyousomeerlang.com/

http://learnyouanagda.liamoc.net/

http://landoflisp.com/

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?

plinkplonk
There are plenty of non funny, brilliant technical books, even those introducing a new language(Clojure Programming or even K&R). I think you need to just focus on doing a solid job vs trying to "be funny".