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Systems & Low-Level Beginner

Rust for Beginners: Ownership, Borrowing and Your First CLI

Get past the borrow checker for good and ship a real command-line tool with Cargo.

Rated 4.0 out of 5 from 1 review 24 students

DO Created by Dimitri Orlov

  • Last updated August 2026
  • English
  • 11h 2m of material
  • 83 lessons

What you will learn

8 concrete outcomes

Every bullet below is something you will have built, shipped or be able to explain by the time you finish the last lesson.

  • Explain ownership, moves, borrows and lifetimes well enough to predict compiler errors
  • Model data with structs and enums and destructure it with exhaustive pattern matching
  • Use traits and generics to write reusable code, including trait objects where needed
  • Handle errors idiomatically with Option, Result, the question-mark operator and custom types
  • Work fluently with iterators, closures and the standard collections
  • Organise code with modules, crates, workspaces and Cargo features
  • Test with unit tests, integration tests and documentation tests
  • Build and release a cross-platform command-line binary with clap and rayon

Course curriculum

7 modules · 83 lessons · 11h 2m of material

10 lessons running 1h 18m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

14 lessons running 1h 52m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

12 lessons running 1h 34m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

13 lessons running 1h 44m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

11 lessons running 1h 26m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

11 lessons running 1h 28m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

12 lessons running 1h 38m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

7 modules · 83 lessons

11h 2m total length

Requirements

Short list, and deliberately so. If you meet these you can start today.

  • Programming experience in any language; systems experience is helpful but not required
  • A machine that can install rustup and a recent stable Rust toolchain
  • Willingness to read compiler errors carefully, because Rust errors are unusually good

About this course

Almost everyone who bounces off Rust bounces off the same wall, and it is not syntax. It is fighting the borrow checker without a model of what it is protecting. This course front-loads that model. Ownership, moves, borrows and lifetimes are introduced with diagrams and small programs deliberately written to fail, so the errors become predictable rather than arbitrary.

Once the model is in place the language opens up quickly. You cover structs and enums, pattern matching, traits and generics, collections, iterators and closures, and the two error-handling types that shape all Rust code, Option and Result, with the question-mark operator and custom error types using thiserror. Modules, crates and the Cargo workflow are covered properly, including workspaces, features and documentation tests.

The project thread is a real command-line tool: a file search and replace utility with recursive traversal, glob filters, coloured output, a dry-run mode and parallel execution with rayon. It uses clap for arguments, anyhow for error context, criterion for benchmarks, and ships as a release binary for three platforms through a continuous integration workflow.

Topics covered

Frequently asked questions

Still unsure about something? Write to misteryjj100@gmail.com and a human answers, usually the same working day.

No. Ownership is explained from first principles with memory diagrams, and prior manual memory management sometimes creates habits that need adjusting anyway.

Most learners report the shift during the third module, once moves and borrows are visualised rather than memorised. The exercises are built to force exactly that moment.

Only briefly at the end. Async deserves its own treatment and appears in the intermediate and systems courses, since it builds on lifetimes and traits.

Checkout is handled on our provider's secure payment page. The moment your payment clears we email your personal access link and access code to the address you used at checkout, and the same link appears in your account library. There is nothing to install and nothing to wait for.

Email misteryjj100@gmail.com within 14 days of your purchase, quote your order number, and we refund the full amount to your original payment method. No form to fill in and no questions about how much of the course you watched.

What students say

Reviews are written by people who bought this course. We publish the critical ones too.

4.0

Rated 4.0 out of 5

Course rating · 1 review

Rating distribution

  • 5 stars 0%
  • 4 stars 100%
  • 3 stars 0%
  • 2 stars 0%
  • 1 star 0%
  • KW

    Kenji Watanabe

    Systems programmer

    Dec 2025
    Rated 4.0 out of 5

    Got me past the borrow checker

    The moves and borrows chapter, with its diagram of what the compiler is actually tracking, is why I can now write Rust without a fight every ten minutes. Finishing the parallel search tool felt like a real accomplishment rather than a tutorial exercise. My one complaint is that trait objects turn up late and get much less room than generics, when they showed up in my own code almost immediately.

Your instructor

DO

Dimitri Orlov

Rust engineer and performance specialist

  • 64 students taught
  • 4 courses published
  • 4.8 instructor rating
  • Rust
  • Low-level programming
  • Performance tuning
  • Embedded systems

Dimitri writes Rust for networking gear and battery-powered devices, and came to it after a long stretch of production C he does not miss. He teaches ownership and borrowing by showing the exact C bug each rule prevents, which makes the borrow checker feel like a colleague rather than an obstacle. His courses build a real binary — a parser, a server, a no-std firmware image — and then take a profiler to it. He reviews for a Rust working group and speaks at systems meetups.

See every course by Dimitri Orlov
$79 USD

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