Hands-On Rust

First, I'm a professional software engineer. I was interested in this book because I've been interested in learning Rust, and what better way to learn than writing a video game! But I'm a little torn on this book. Overall, it did give me a project to work through while learning Rust. It was mostly well written. Where I felt it fell short was that it sometimes didn't go deep enough into the Rust language and there were a few errors in some of the writing that made it very confusing at times. I spent quite a bit of time on the Rust website reading their documentation. While I was able to work my way around the problems and get the games to work, someone with less experience may struggle more or even give up. I was also frustrated with the inconsistent code formatting. I'm kind-of a stickler for consistency in code. In the same code snippet a variable would be defined something like, "variable_name: type", and another like, "variable_name : type". That is just one example.

Overall, I would recommend the book to anyone interested in Rust and video games. I would just suggest some patience when the game doesn't run, even when coded exactly as described in the text.

Really enjoyed working through this book, though as an intro to Rust it is probably not for the faint of heart. Other books are better intros. As an intro to ECS, Entity Component Systems, of which most games are made though, I think it was pretty fantastic.

So, 5 out of 5, for ECS. Docking a point, because even though it was fun to use Rust for that, it was a head scratcher at times and I don't believe I am a slouch at coding or how to work stuff out (or times when code was refactored/removed but it was not so clear.).

I also would have liked if it had used one of the main Rust ECS systems, Amethyst or Bevy, rather than bracket-lib as now I feel I have to learn their quirks before I can just roll my sleeves up and dive in.

That said... Really liked it though. Author did a very good job and I normally hate most coding books. Recommended.

(also, would love to see the exact same sort of book written for Go Lang and Ebiten as I am still trying to figure out which would be best for my project(s).).