The second edition of The Rust Programming Language is getting ever closer to being printed! This means we're not able to make large changes to chapters that are in any column to the right of, and including, the "Frozen" column on our Project board. Issues or pull requests submitted for frozen chapters are welcome but will be closed until we start work on a third edition. Thank you!

This repo contains two editions of “The Rust Programming Language”; we recommend starting with the second edition.

The second edition is a rewrite that will be printed by No Starch Press, available around May 2018. Check the No Starch Page for the latest information on the release date and how to order.

You can read the book for free online! Please see the book as shipped with the latest stable, beta, or nightly Rust releases. Be aware that issues in those versions may have been fixed in this repository already.

The first edition is still available to read online.

Building the book requires mdBook, ideally the same version that rust-lang/rust uses in this file. To get it:

$ cargo install mdbook --vers [version-num]

To build the book, first cd into either the first-edition or second-edition directory depending on which edition of the book you would like to build. Then type:

$ mdbook build

The output will be in the book subdirectory. To check it out, open it in your web browser.

Firefox:

$ firefox book/index.html                       # Linux
$ open -a "Firefox" book/index.html             # OS X
$ Start-Process "firefox.exe" .\book\index.html # Windows (PowerShell)
$ start firefox.exe .\book\index.html           # Windows (Cmd)

Chrome:

$ google-chrome book/index.html                 # Linux
$ open -a "Google Chrome" book/index.html       # OS X
$ Start-Process "chrome.exe" .\book\index.html  # Windows (PowerShell)
$ start chrome.exe .\book\index.html            # Windows (Cmd)

To run the tests:

$ mdbook test

We'd love your help! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md to learn about the kinds of contributions we're looking for.

We'd especially love help translating the second edition of the book! See the Translations label to join in efforts that are currently in progress. Open a new issue to start working on a new language! We're waiting on mdbook support for multiple languages before we merge any in, but feel free to start! The chapters in the frozen column of the project won't see major changes, so if you start with those, you won't have to redo work :)

As the second edition of the book will be published by No Starch, we first iterate here, then ship the text off to No Starch. Then they do editing, and we fold it back in.

As such, there’s a directory, nostarch, which corresponds to the text in No Starch’s system.

When we've started working with No Starch in a word doc, we will also check those into the repo in the nostarch/odt directory. To extract the text from the word doc as markdown in order to backport changes to the online book:

1. Open the doc file in LibreOffice
2. Accept all tracked changes
3. Save as Microsoft Word 2007-2013 XML (.docx) in the tmp directory
4. Run ./doc-to-md.sh
5. Inspect changes made to the markdown file in the nostarch directory and copy the changes to the src directory as appropriate.

This is mostly for Carol's reference because she keeps having to look it up.

We're using Graphviz for some of the diagrams in the book. The source for those files live in the dot directory. To turn a dot file, for example, dot/trpl04-01.dot into an svg, run:

$ dot dot/trpl04-01.dot -Tsvg > src/img/trpl04-01.svg

In the generated SVG, remove the width and the height attributes from the svg element and set the viewBox attribute to 0.00 0.00 1000.00 1000.00 or other values that don't cut off the image.

To scan source files for spelling errors, you can use the spellcheck.sh script. It needs a dictionary of valid words, which is provided in dictionary.txt. If the script produces a false positive (say, you used word BTreeMap which the script considers invalid), you need to add this word to dictionary.txt (keep the sorted order for consistency).