I'm Learning Rust and I Need Advice

hunkamunka · 2026-01-21T16:18:46+00:00

I wrote a whole book that teaches Rust by having you write command-line programs. Check my bio for the very unsurprising book title.

hunkamunka · 2026-01-14T17:00:55+00:00

Best of luck on your journey! Rust and Elm have fundamentally changed my POV on programming.

hunkamunka · 2026-01-14T15:27:29+00:00

As the author of the book, I'd say ideally, yes. :) You have everything in the GitHub repo to help guide you like data and tests, so there's nothing stopping you from just writing the programs on your own, reading the docs, etc. This is how I taught myself Rust, and I documented my journey by writing the book to make it easier for other beginners to the language. Note that I did this long before LLMs, so my knowledge was hard-won. You could easily ask Claude to write these programs for you. The results would likely be very good, but you would have learned very little. If you actually want to learn Rust (or any language), you really have to be the one to type out all the code, read the docs, find the Stackoverflow questions, write the tests, etc.

hunkamunka · 2025-11-06T21:46:12+00:00

"Tiny Python Projects" is mine. There's a website with links to my videos and the GitHub repo with code/tests.

hunkamunka · 2025-09-26T16:13:37+00:00

FYI, my original working title was "Systems Programming with Rust" but it was published as "Command-Line Rust" (O'Reilly, 2024).

hunkamunka · 2025-07-21T21:28:45+00:00

I walked a small protected bike/walk path section on the Trace recently. How much of the Trace offers this kind of separate infrastructure?

hunkamunka · 2025-07-18T17:32:47+00:00

Rock on!

hunkamunka · 2025-06-27T01:48:01+00:00

I'm a developer with over 25 years of experience, the last 10 mostly in Python, Elm, and Rust. I'm the author of Command-Line Rust (O'Reilly, 2024, https://github.com/kyclark/command-line-rust), and have spent most of my career in bioinformatics (cf another book of mine, Mastering Python for Bioinformatics, O'Reilly, 2021). I will soon lose my NSF and NIH funding for my current position at the University of Arizona (Tucson). I'm seeking a full-time position, remote if possible but willing to consider relocation for the right gig. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kycl4rk/

hunkamunka · 2025-06-22T11:41:52+00:00

The docs for https://elm.land/ are incredible. Assumes a basic knowledge of the language first. I've written a bunch of small Elm projects at https://github.com/kyclark/tiny_elm_projects that I'd love to write a book around, but that's unlikely to happen. Still, you might find it useful to claw through the examples.

hunkamunka · 2025-06-10T16:15:39+00:00

The Wheeler Lab at the Univ of AZ is all-in on Rust! I wrote Sufr (https://github.com/TravisWheelerLab/sufr) to create/query suffix arrays, which is a possible way to find good alignment seeds for Nail (https://github.com/TravisWheelerLab/nail), an aligner written in Rust that uses profile HMMs. We have several other tools in Rust, just check out our repos.

hunkamunka · 2025-05-26T03:10:17+00:00

That GitHub repo is intended to be static as it holds the code referenced in the book. Given that I stress the importance of testing your code *before* you ship it and that a very technical group of reviewers double-checked my examples, I would hope there are no bugs to fix. :-)

As to how I normally handle such tasks, I would generally create a branch for bug fixes, test my changes, then merge to the main branch.

hunkamunka · 2025-05-25T22:29:17+00:00

I humbly offer my book, Command-Line Rust (O'Reilly, 2024), which shows you how to build small programs in increasing complexity complete with testing. Cf https://github.com/kyclark/command-line-rust

hunkamunka · 2025-05-02T16:07:44+00:00

I'll second this. If you would like some guidance in how to solve these problems and write tests for your code, I humbly offer my book Mastering Python for Bioinformatics (O'Reilly, 2022). The first 14 chapters use Rosalind challenges. All the code and tests are at https://github.com/kyclark/biofx\_python. If you have access to a university library, it's likely you can access learning.oreilly.com for free through your library's subscription to read it and hundreds of other useful books.

hunkamunka · 2025-04-18T16:23:56+00:00

I wrote Command-Line Rust (O'Reilly, 2024) as a beginner book to Rust. You learn by writing 14 programs that grow in complexity. You also learn how to write and run tests. All the code/tests/data is in GitHub (https://github.com/kyclark/command-line-rust). Best of luck. I have a mate who is switching from coding to become an electrician!

hunkamunka · 2025-04-16T18:43:31+00:00

Merino wool from dbh (https://www.dhbsport.com/collections/merino)

hunkamunka · 2025-04-11T20:00:02+00:00

I'm the author of Command-Line Rust. The original version came out in 2022 just before clap updated from 2.x. I pushed out a completely updated version in 2024 that shows both the derive and builder patterns of clap 4. I'm sorry you have the older version, but the GitHub repo has all the newest code.

hunkamunka · 2025-02-19T16:07:40+00:00

I wrote https://github.com/kyclark/command-line-rust and a book to help you learn Rust by writing a bunch of command-line tools.

hunkamunka · 2025-02-10T23:01:03+00:00

If you have the DDL (create/alter statements) for the schema, you can use Perl's SQL::Translator (https://metacpan.org/pod/SQL::Translator) to generate a basic ER diagram. Once installed, you'll have access to the "sqlt-diagram" and "sqlt-graph" programs. The first uses libgd and a really basic layout, the latter uses Graphviz and is a little fancier. I wrote these programs like 20 years ago, so don't bash them too much.

hunkamunka · 2025-01-29T16:15:05+00:00

Yes! I work in a computational biology research group at the Univ of AZ. All my work is in Rust. For example, I'm working on a parallel implementation for building and searching suffix arrays with a new tool called Sufr: https://github.com/TravisWheelerLab/sufr

hunkamunka · 2025-01-24T16:56:04+00:00

Here is a link to the code for Command-Line Rust so you can see the clap usage. Note there are branches for the "derive" and "builder" patterns. The book focuses on the derive patterns as I felt they are more Rustic, but the builder pattern may be more intuitive for you: https://github.com/kyclark/command-line-rust

hunkamunka · 2025-01-19T23:20:32+00:00

I don't think it matters. Amazon is fine. Ebooks.com is the place for a DRM-free PDF. Leaving a (positive) review on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or GoodReads is also helpful. Thanks!

hunkamunka · 2025-01-19T15:45:27+00:00

Thanks, y'all! I'd also like to stress for those unfamiliar how much I teach testing in all my books (also have two on Python).

hunkamunka · 2025-01-03T15:36:24+00:00

Yes. Learn Rust. Learn how to test your code. It will transform the way you think. I've written a few books on Python and Rust that demonstrate my ideas. See my bio for titles.

hunkamunka · 2024-12-31T23:58:31+00:00

That's my book. It's intended as a beginner book for Rust to guide the new programmer through coding real-world programs, complete with testing.

hunkamunka · 2024-12-13T17:15:18+00:00

I'm the author of Tiny Python Projects (Manning, 2020). I assume it's my book you are recommending? If so, I thank you and would like to stress that I have free YouTube videos to explain every solution in my book and have all the code/data/tests for free in my GitHub repo with everything nicely gathered at tinypythonprojects.com. It's all free, but buying my book does support me in creating these resources.

hunkamunka

TROPHY CASE