Where to go next

You've written a lot of Rust by now. Here's how to keep going, roughly in the order most people find useful. Everything marked free costs nothing.

Read: the books Rust developers recommend

• The Rust Programming Language ("the Book", free). The official introduction. Reading it after this course fills gaps and shows the same ideas from a second angle.
• Rust by Example (free). Short runnable examples for nearly every feature. Great as a reference.
• The Rust Reference and the standard library docs (free). Learn to read the std docs fluently; it's the skill you'll use most at work.
• Zero To Production in Rust by Luca Palmieri. Builds a real email-newsletter web service with axum-style tooling, tests and CI. The natural next step after the Pro Track.
• Rust for Rustaceans by Jon Gjengset. For when you're comfortable: API design, unsafe, async internals, and how experienced Rust developers think.
• Programming Rust (O'Reilly) by Blandy, Orendorff and Tindall. A thorough, deep reference of the whole language.
• Rust Atomics and Locks by Mara Bos (free online). Concurrency from the ground up, by a Rust library team lead.
• Asynchronous Programming in Rust and the Tokio tutorial (free). How async really works, then how to use it.
• The Rustonomicon (free). The dark arts of unsafe Rust. Read it before you write unsafe code that others depend on.
• The Cargo Book and Rust API Guidelines (free). How to structure, document and publish crates the way the community expects.

Practice

• Rustlings (free). Small exercises you fix in your own editor with the compiler guiding you. A good way to get fast in a real setup.
• Exercism's Rust track (free). Over a hundred exercises, with optional human mentoring that teaches idiomatic style.
• Advent of Code (free). Puzzles every December (and all past years). Solving a year in Rust teaches iterators, parsing and performance.
• LeetCode and Codewars. Interview-style problems; both support Rust.
• Deathmatch here. Keep your fundamentals sharp with a few reps a day, and use the interview mode before interviews.

Build things

The fastest way to grow is to build something you care about and finish it. Ideas, by area:

• Command-line tools: a grep, ls or jq clone; a markdown-to-HTML converter; a Git helper. Read the Command Line Applications in Rust book (free).
• Web services: extend the Pro Track capstone: users and authentication, background jobs, rate limiting, metrics, a deployment.
• Systems: a key-value store with a write-ahead log, an interpreter for a small language (Crafting Interpreters is free online), a Redis clone.
• WebAssembly: run Rust in the browser with wasm-bindgen.
• Embedded: blink an LED on a microcontroller with The Embedded Rust Book.
• Games: Bevy or macroquad.
• Desktop apps: Tauri or egui.

Contribute to open source

Contributing to real projects is the best evidence of skill you can show an employer. Look for issues labeled "good first issue" or "E-easy" in crates you already use, for example clippy, rust-analyzer, Tokio or axum. Documentation fixes and tests are welcome first contributions. This Week in Rust lists "call for participation" issues every week.

Join the community

• The Rust users forum: friendly, helpful answers to questions at every level.
• This Week in Rust: a weekly newsletter of news, articles and jobs.
• r/rust and the community Discord.
• Local Rust meetups and conferences such as RustConf, EuroRust and RustNation have many talks free on YouTube.

Getting a Rust job

• Show your work. Your Pro Track repository, with green CI checks on every project, is a portfolio. Pin it on your GitHub profile and link it on your CV.
• Know the workplace stack: Cargo workspaces, error handling with thiserror/anyhow, serde, tokio, axum or actix-web, sqlx, tracing, testing and clippy. You've used all of them here.
• Practice explaining ownership, borrowing, lifetimes and Send/Sync out loud; interviewers ask. Deathmatch's interview mode has the classic questions.
• Rust is used at companies building infrastructure, databases, browsers, cloud services, embedded devices, fintech and developer tools. Many teams hire experienced developers in other languages and teach them Rust, so bring your whole background.

Good luck, and keep shipping.