Top Rust books recommended by experts

At MentorCruise, we are all about making the most out of the experience of others. As part of that, we've connected and asked dozens of experts and professionals about their favourite Rust books – and here are the answers.

Table of Contents

Fundamentals of Rust

Understanding the concepts of Rust starts with understanding the fundamentals. On your way to mastery, it's crucial for you to understand how certain concepts were derived, and why things work like they do. Starting with these resources is the best way to do so.

Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development

The Rust systems programming language combines that control with a modern type system that catches broad classes of common mistakes, from memory management errors to data races between threads.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Rust Atomics and Locks: Low-Level Concurrency in Practice

The Rust programming language is extremely well suited for concurrency, and its ecosystem has many libraries that include lots of concurrent data structures, locks, and more. But implementing those structures correctly can be very difficult.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Ultimate Rust for Systems Programming

This book is your guide to mastering Rust programming, equipping you with essential skills and insights for efficient system programming. It starts by introducing Rust's significance in the system programming domain and highlighting its advantages over traditional languages like C/C++.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches

Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches teaches you to write super fast and super safe Rust code through lessons you can fit in your lunch break. Crystal-clear explanations and focused, relevant examples make it accessible to anyone—even if you're learning Rust as your first programming language.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Zero To Production In Rust: An introduction to backend development

Zero To Production is the ideal starting point for your journey as a Rust backend developer.You will learn by doing: you will build a fully functional email newsletter API, starting from scratch.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Zero to Production In Rust: An introduction to backend development in Rust

Zero To Production is the ideal starting point for your journey as a Rust backend developer.
You will learn by doing: you will build a fully functional email newsletter API, starting from scratch.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Additional Rust Reading

These books are not required for you to learn Rust, but they are highly recommended for you to deepen your knowledge.

Command-Line Rust: A Project-Based Primer for Writing Rust CLIs

For several consecutive years, Rust has been voted "most loved programming language" in Stack Overflow's annual developer survey. This open source systems programming language is now used for everything from game engines and operating systems to browser components and virtual reality simulation engines. But Rust is also an incredibly complex language with a notoriously difficult learning curve…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Practical Systems Programming with Rust

Modern programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, and Java have become increasingly accepted for application-level programming, but for systems programming, C and C++ are predominantly used due to the need for low-level control of system resources. Rust promises the best of both worlds: the type safety of Java, and the speed and expressiveness of C++, while also including memory safety …

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Rust in Action

Rust in Action is a hands-on guide to systems programming with Rust. Written for inquisitive programmers, it presents real-world use cases that go far beyond syntax and structure. Rust in Action introduces the Rust programming language by exploring numerous systems programming concepts and techniques.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

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Senior Software Engineer at GitHub Actions. I build distributed systems and tooling for platform engineering and developer experience, improving how teams deploy and scale cloud-native workloads. I’m especially interested in Go, Kubernetes, networking, containers, and observability. I also maintain a strong interest in emerging technologies like Rust, eBPF, and WebAssembly …

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I work at Facebook as both a Production Engineer which is a hybrid role between a Software Engineer and an SRE as well as a pure Software Engineer. I've worked on the upstream Linux Kernel as well as Meta's custom AI/ML ASIC stack. I have 15 years of experience building …

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I’m a Senior Software Engineer with nearly 9 years of experience in software development, spanning domains such as Developer Experience (DevX), Identity Security, and database technologies. Currently, I work at Amazon Web Services as part of the Aurora PostgreSQL Product team. My technical background includes extensive experience in Java, Rust, …

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Hello! I believe code is art and humans thrive when they feel heard, understood, and supported. If this resonates with you, I hope you will reach out! With nearly 10 years of professional software experience across the public and private sectors, I have seen a wide range of systems and …

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Hi there! I'm an Associate Principal, Trust and Safety Analyst at Google, specialising in product and operation strategy that protects our ads ecosystem from abuse. I use strategy thinking, data analytics, and cross functional leadership to drive business decisions. Before I joined Google, I worked in cybersecurity research and have …

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