Rust From Zero

Overview

Google, IBM & Meta Certificates — All 10,000+ Courses at 40% Off

One annual plan covers every course and certificate on Coursera. 40% off for a limited time.

Learn Rust from the ground up — the systems language that gives you C-level speed without the footguns and Python-level safety without a garbage collector. This course starts with `rustup`, `cargo`, and your first `Hello, world!`, then builds through the ideas that make Rust distinctive: ownership, borrowing, and the borrow checker. You will master move semantics, the `Copy` and `Clone` traits, and how Rust prevents dangling references at compile time. You will handle errors with `Option`, `Result`, and the `?` operator, and match them exhaustively with patterns and guards. Finally, you will write generic code with traits and lifetimes, organize programs with modules, and use closures and iterators to process data lazily and efficiently. Each lesson pairs transcripts with runnable Cargo examples grounded in the Rust compiler's own error messages. By the end, you will ship a capstone project that combines the course concepts into an end-to-end Rust program you can extend.

Syllabus

Language Foundations

Install the Rust toolchain, ship a first Cargo project, and learn the scalar and compound types you will reach for every day: let and mut, functions, control flow, tuples, arrays, structs, String and string slices, Vec, and HashMap.

Ownership and Error Handling

The two ideas that make Rust different from every other systems language: a value has exactly one owner and is freed deterministically on scope exit, and errors are values on the type-checked return path rather than exceptions. This module covers moves, Copy and Clone,shared and exclusive references, enums, Option, pattern matching,panics, and Result with the question mark operator.

Abstractions

The three abstractions that let Rust stay allocation-free while looking high-level: generics (monomorphized at compile time), traits(shared behavior and dynamic dispatch), and lifetimes (proving references never dangle). The module closes with modules, closures,and the iterator combinators (map, filter, collect) that make data pipelines idiomatic.

Capstone Project

Apply everything from Weeks 1 through 3 to build a single end-to-end Rust command-line program. The capstone has two tracks: a local project that ships with tests and a clippy-clean build, and a zero-install playground reading that works in any browser via the Rust Playground at play.rust-lang.org.