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Rust Mastery Curriculum

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Deep Rust Mastery Curriculum (Free Resources Edition)

Philosophy & Approach

This curriculum prioritizes understanding over memorization. You'll build mental models of how Rust works at a fundamental level, enabling you to reason about complex problems rather than pattern-match solutions.

Phase 1: Foundation & Mental Models (4-6 weeks)

Week 1-2: The Ownership Revolution

Goal: Internalize why ownership exists, not just how it works

Resources:

Deep Dive Activities:

  • Trace memory allocation/deallocation manually on paper for simple programs
  • Compare Rust's approach to C++ RAII, garbage collection, and manual memory management
  • Read this article on ownership multiple times

Exercise:

Reflection: Write explanations of ownership as if teaching a 10-year-old, then a C programmer, then a Python developer

Week 3-4: Borrowing & Lifetimes—The Hard Parts

Goal: Develop intuition for the borrow checker

Resources:

Deep Dive:

Projects:

  • Build a simple text editor buffer with efficient insertions
  • Implement a graph structure with multiple ownership patterns (Rc, RefCell)
  • Create a custom iterator that borrows from its parent structure
  • Complete Exercism - Rust Track exercises: Clock, Circular Buffer, Doubly Linked List

Week 5-6: Type System Mastery

Goal: Think in types, not just code

Resources:

Deep Dive:

  • Trait objects vs generics: monomorphization costs and tradeoffs
  • Marker traits (Send, Sync, Copy, Sized) and their implications
  • Associated types vs generic parameters—when to use each
  • Read the std::iter module docs completely

Projects:

  • Implement a small serialization library using traits (inspired by serde)
  • Build a plugin system using trait objects
  • Create your own Result-like type with custom error handling
  • Study Serde's source code to understand trait magic

Phase 2: Concurrency & Async (6-8 weeks)

Week 7-9: Fearless Concurrency Foundations

Goal: Understand why Rust makes concurrency safe

Resources:

Deep Dive:

  • How Send and Sync prevent data races at compile time
  • Memory ordering: Relaxed, Acquire, Release, SeqCst
  • Interior mutability pattern: Cell, RefCell, Mutex, RwLock
  • Read std::sync module docs thoroughly

Projects:

Week 10-12: Async Rust—The Complete Picture

Goal: Understand async from first principles

Resources:

Deep Dive:

  • What is a Future? Implement your own simple future following this guide
  • How polling works: Poll::Ready vs Poll::Pending
  • The Waker API and how runtimes schedule tasks
  • Pin and why it exists (this is hard—spend time here)
  • Read futures crate docs

Critical Understanding:

  • Async is about I/O concurrency, not parallelism
  • The "function coloring" problem and its implications
  • Structured concurrency with select! and join!

Required Reading:

Week 13-14: Async Ecosystems & Patterns

Goal: Master practical async programming

Resources:

Study:

  • Tokio vs async-std vs smol: architectural differences
  • Channels: mpsc, broadcast, watch, oneshot
  • Async traits and why they're challenging
  • Read tokio source code - start with tokio::time

Projects:

  • Complete the Tokio mini-Redis tutorial fully
  • Build an async HTTP server from scratch (without frameworks) - follow Jon Gjengset's stream
  • Implement a connection pool with timeouts and backpressure
  • Create a pub-sub system using Tokio's broadcast channels
  • Build a rate limiter using async semaphores

Phase 3: Advanced Patterns & Systems (8-12 weeks)

Week 15-17: Zero-Cost Abstractions

Goal: Write high-level code that compiles to optimal machine code

Resources:

Deep Dive:

  • Understanding LLVM IR: use Compiler Explorer (Godbolt) with Rust
  • Inlining, devirtualization, and constant folding
  • Profile-guided optimization
  • Reading assembly output with cargo asm (install with cargo install cargo-show-asm)
  • Study criterion.rs for benchmarking

Projects:

Week 18-20: Unsafe Rust & FFI

Goal: Know when and how to break the rules safely

Resources:

Deep Dive:

  • Undefined behavior and how to avoid it
  • Raw pointers and their limitations
  • Writing sound unsafe abstractions
  • FFI with C libraries
  • Study std library unsafe usage - search for unsafe

Projects:

  • Implement a custom allocator (use std::alloc::GlobalAlloc)
  • Create Rust bindings for a C library using bindgen
  • Build a simple arena allocator
  • Study crossbeam's lock-free structures - careful unsafe usage
  • Contribute to Miri test cases (undefined behavior detector)

Week 21-23: Macros—Metaprogramming Mastery

Goal: Generate code at compile time elegantly

Resources:

Deep Dive:

  • Declarative macros: pattern matching on syntax
  • Procedural macros: derive, attribute, function-like
  • Hygiene and macro expansion order
  • Use cargo expand to see macro output
  • Study syn and quote crates

Projects:

Week 24-26: Error Handling & Observability

Goal: Build production-ready error handling

Resources:

Study:

  • Error trait design: std::error::Error
  • When to use anyhow vs thiserror
  • Structured logging with tracing
  • Distributed tracing concepts

Projects:

  • Design a comprehensive error type for a multi-layer application
  • Instrument async code with tracing spans
  • Build a metrics collection system using tracing-subscriber
  • Study tokio-tracing examples
  • Create error report with full context chain (study eyre and color-eyre)

Phase 4: Real-World Systems (Ongoing)

Domain-Specific Mastery

Systems Programming:
Resources:

Projects:

Web & Backend:
Resources:

Projects:

  • Build a complete REST API with Axum
  • Implement WebSocket server with state management
  • Create a simple database driver from scratch (study tokio-postgres)
  • Build a web scraper with reqwest and scraper
  • Study rustls source - TLS implementation

Blockchain/DeFi:
Resources:

Projects:

  • Deep dive into Solana's runtime and BPF
  • Study Anchor framework internals (read source)
  • Implement AMM math from scratch (constant product, stable swap)
  • Build cross-program invocation patterns
  • Study successful programs: Serum DEX, Mango Markets
  • Understand account rent and program derived addresses

Performance Engineering:
Resources:

Projects:

  • Profile real applications with perf, cargo flamegraph
  • Optimize memory allocations using heaptrack
  • Study cache-friendly data structures
  • Learn SIMD programming with std::simd
  • Contribute performance improvements to open-source Rust projects

Continuous Learning Practices

Daily Habits (Pick 2-3)

  1. Read source code (30 min): Study well-written Rust projects

    • Essential repos to study:

  2. Write code (1-2 hours): Build small experiments

    • Rustlings daily
    • Implement algorithms in Rust
    • Recreate crates you use to understand them

  3. Teach others:

Weekly Activities

  • Code review: Review Rust PRs on GitHub

    • Find projects with "good first issue" label
    • Study how maintainers review code

  • Deep dive: Pick one concept and understand it completely

  • Build something: Work on a meaningful project

Monthly Goals

Essential Free Resources Summary

📚 Must-Read Books (All Free!)

  1. The Rust Programming Language
  2. Rust By Example
  3. The Rustonomicon
  4. Rust Atomics and Locks
  5. Asynchronous Programming in Rust
  6. The Little Book of Rust Macros
  7. Too Many Linked Lists
  8. The Rust Performance Book

🎥 Video Series

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