Learn Rust in 7 Days
One focused week, from "hello, world" to building real things.
This is the sprint. Seven days, a few lessons each, no filler. Block out an hour or two a day, write every example by hand, and by next week you'll be reading and writing real Rust. If a day feels heavy, that's normal — ownership and the advanced stretch earn their place.
- Day 1
Get Rust running
Install the toolchain and ship your first program with Cargo.
- Day 2
The everyday basics
Types, functions, branching, and loops — the building blocks.
- Day 3
Ownership, Rust's superpower
The mental model that makes every later lesson click.
- Day 4
Model your own data
Structs, enums, methods, and the pattern matching that ties them together.
- Day 5
Collections & error handling
The everyday containers, plus how Rust wants you to handle failure.
- Day 6
Reusable, tested code
Generics, traits, lifetimes, tests, and the functional toolkit.
- Generics: Write It Once, for Every Type14m
- Traits: One Idea Behind derive, PartialOrd, and From15m
- Lifetimes: Telling the Compiler Which Reference You Meant14m
- Writing and Running Tests with #[test] and assert_eq!13m
- Closures: Functions That Capture Their Environment13m
- Iterators: The Trait Behind Every for Loop13m
- Organizing Code with Modules, Packages, and Crates13m
- Day 7
Build & go further
Real I/O, JSON, a CLI, and a first taste of the advanced topics.
- Files and I/O: Arguments, Environment Variables, and Writing Files13m
- Serde and JSON: Turning Structs into Data13m
- Building a CLI: A To-Do List That Uses Everything15m
- Smart Pointers: Box, Rc, and RefCell17m
- Fearless Concurrency: Threads and Message Passing17m
- Shared State: Mutex, Arc, and Send/Sync18m
- Async Basics: async/await and Tokio17m
- Macros 101: macro_rules!16m
- Where to Go Next14m
The biggest day — pace yourself. This is where it all comes together.
Prefer a different pace?
Same 38-lesson course, mapped a different way.