mf2 reviewed Zero To Production In Rust by Luca Palmieri
None
1 star
For some reason the Rust community loves to write countless lines of boilerplate code to achieve very simple things, and Luca Palmieri is no exception - the book starts out with a simple program, but with each chapter he adds structs, functions, more structs ontop of the existing structs and tons of boilerplate in general, just so that he can save two lines of code at some other place.
Then, he goes on to pull in hundreds of third party packages for an application that is supposed to run on a public server, being exposed under a public port - without batting an eye. There is not even a footnote that running such an mount of third party code might be a security concern. And keep in mind that these hundreds of packages wouldn't be required to accomplish the task at hand in the first place, if it wasn't for …
For some reason the Rust community loves to write countless lines of boilerplate code to achieve very simple things, and Luca Palmieri is no exception - the book starts out with a simple program, but with each chapter he adds structs, functions, more structs ontop of the existing structs and tons of boilerplate in general, just so that he can save two lines of code at some other place.
Then, he goes on to pull in hundreds of third party packages for an application that is supposed to run on a public server, being exposed under a public port - without batting an eye. There is not even a footnote that running such an mount of third party code might be a security concern. And keep in mind that these hundreds of packages wouldn't be required to accomplish the task at hand in the first place, if it wasn't for Palmieris love for boilerplate constructs.
Furthermore, the writing style is annoying - the author uses words like "empowerment" or "black magic" when talking about software development/programming. This is topped off with an emotional style using words like "awesome" or "yay" when talking about command-line tools, which I personally just find unnecessary.
You even encounter things like "yesssssss" or "what the fuck", making this really hard to read without cringing to the floor every other paragraph.
The positive thing about the book is that the author arranged the information in the same way you would go about stumbling yourself doing something like this - trying something out, failing, trying something else, succeeding, and then he explains why this works the way it does. For me personally, this style of learning fits much better than the books that present one concept per chapter, without any room for common errors or similar.
Nevertheless, I can't give this book more than one star for the complete lack of thoughts regarding the security implications of pulling tons of unnecessary dependencies in your project. He even claims that the book is supposed to teach Rust to programming beginners. I fear that one day I will have someone on my team who learned to "develop" software with the practices shown in this book; undoing that damage will take years.
