Students: Your experience with the course

[mgeisler]

Dear people who have either taken the course or read through it as a self-study:

• What did you think?
• What worked well?
• What should we improve?

Feel free to share your feedback here!

[cangomescisco]

What did you think?

I loved the approach did you choose. Always brings practical cases to teaching the rust aspects.

What worked well?

The exercises. I like to learn a new language by implementing good examples, and you bring nice ones. I prefer to learn theory by implementing something.

You've also demonstrated that Rust's complexity can be understood. I loved the diagrams. It helped a lot in reducing abstractions and memorizing better.

What should we improve?

You can add more tips and links/resources on subjects important to completing the exercise that wasn't previously taught. For example, I spent too much time in the Polygon exercise (Day 2 Morning) understanding that I needed to implement operator overloading using traits (Day 3 Morning).

In other exercises happened the same situation, I felt a gap in knowledge to start the exercise, and I lost much time researching =/

Add instructions on how to run the tests cargo test.

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Thanks for this course 😃 ! Now I feel safer studying other sources 🦀 !

[mgeisler]

Thanks a lot @cangomescisco!

I love the diagrams too — in particular the wacky way they're implemented: moved-strings-rust.md. It's tedious to update, but oh-so-satisfying to look at afterwards in the source 😄

Your point about the exercises is good: it's something I hadn't thought much about since we normally end up talking about things like operator overloading during the 1st or 2nd day... I feel this is the biggest missing point right now for the course: you only see the tip of the iceberg if you don't have access to an instructor (#101). I hope adding speaker notes (#53) will help here!

Thanks for taking the course and letting us know about it!

[cangomescisco]

@mgeisler Do you plan to translate for other languages? I can help to translate it into Portuguese.

[mgeisler]

Yes, that's also something which is on my radar! Thanks for offering to help 😄

I wrote some infrastructure for this a few months back, but I haven't looked at it in a while: rust-lang/mdBook#1864. I hope to get back to this in some months.

[mgeisler]

Hey @cangomescisco, I've now put up #130 which would allow you to translate the course into Portuguese in a structured way. Please give is a look and let me know on the PR what you think.

[Chiogros]

What did you think?

I loved this synthetic, yet comprehensive enough course. I will certainly advice people to follow it when starting their Rust journey!
Thank you a lot!

What worked well?

The speakers notes are a game changer, bringing more "human" explanations which are really helpful.
The practical exercises, so that we have materials to experiment what we have just learned ; the Rust playground integration is a must for hacking a few lines easily.

What should we improve?

At the end of the course (starting on Day 4 Afternoon), I felt overwhelmed by all the information learned during the previous days.
I would suggest adding external links to blog posts, particular documentation sections or anything which could help understand a concept.

[djmitche]

Thanks! And, good idea -- #1678

[mgeisler]

I taught Rust Fundamentals to Proton engineers some months ago and here is the feedback I collected after the class.

What worked well

• The live coding and interactivity was the highlight. Seeing compiler errors get diagnosed and fixed in real time using official Rust docs made concepts click in a way that slides alone wouldn't. The teaching adapted to our questions rather than sticking rigidly to the agenda.

• The atmosphere was welcoming and I felt comfortable asking questions. This led to productive tangents and deeper exploration beyond the prepared material.

• The pacing was just right. Starting from scratch without assuming prior Rust knowledge helped undo bad habits and anti-patterns picked up elsewhere.

• Being able to run code directly in the slides was great — they double as reference material for review after the course. The exercises at the end of each section were engaging and reinforced the concepts well.

• Having four consecutive in-person days let me focus deeply on Rust without the distraction of regular work.

What could be improved

• I'd love a follow-up course covering async and idiomatic Rust. A session walking through real-world code and discussing design decisions would also be valuable.

• Some exercises were hard to parse — I spent time figuring out what the exercise was asking rather than focusing on the Rust concepts. Clearer instructions would help.

• Day 2 felt like the steepest difficulty spike, especially around lifetime parameters. Re-reading the material and re-doing the exercises in the evening helped, but some gentler scaffolding earlier on would be welcome.

• Traits, generics, and unsafe Rust were overwhelming for those of us coming from front-end or higher-level language backgrounds. The unsafe Rust portion in particular went too deep.

• I'd like more realistic, domain-specific examples in the exercises.

• A small course project tying everything together (like in university courses) would be a nice addition.