Rust Handbook.
Rust from Zero — a visual, deep-dive handbook for learning Rust from absolute zero, taking you from installing the toolchain all the way through unsafe FFI, with a strong emphasis on the concepts that make Rust Rust: ownership, borrowing, lifetimes and fearless concurrency.
Written to actually understand it.
I wrote this while learning Rust, because reading a chapter and writing down what you understood are two very different things. Everything I had to stop and re-read became a section; everything that confused me the first time got an annotated example.
It is a single, self-contained page: no framework, no build step, no external assets. Open it, search it, keep it in a tab.
What's inside.
- Foundations: what Rust is and why it exists, installation and your first program, variables, mutability, types, functions and control flow.
- The heart of it: ownership and borrowing, lifetimes, structs, enums, pattern matching, collections and strings, error handling without exceptions.
- Abstraction: generics and traits, modules and crates, closures and iterators, smart pointers and interior mutability.
- Going further: fearless concurrency, unsafe Rust and FFI, tooling, testing and documentation, performance and how Rust compares.
- Reference: reading the compiler's mind, a realistic study plan and project ideas, cheat sheets, glossary and a self-quiz.
Built for reading, not just displaying.
- Dark / light theme — toggle button or press T, persisted across visits.
- Sticky table of contents with scroll-spy highlighting and a collapsible drawer on mobile.
- Reading progress bar so you know how far through a chapter you are.
- Copy-to-clipboard on every code sample, plus expand/collapse all for skimming.
- 14-question self-quiz with expandable answers at the end.
- Responsive and dependency-free — plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with zero external assets.
- Format: single-page handbook
- Stack: plain HTML, CSS & JavaScript
- Build step: none
- Content: 21 chapters · 88 examples · 24 tables
- License: GPL-3.0
- Published: GitHub Pages + custom domain
Who it's for.
People who have written code in another language and want to actually get ownership and lifetimes, rather than fight the borrow checker until it stops complaining. It also works as a reference to come back to — the cheat sheets and glossary are there for that.
No build, no dependencies.
The whole handbook is one file served straight from GitHub Pages at rust.handbook.ashtontink.com. Nothing to install, nothing to break, and it still works offline once loaded.
The handbook is the study method.
Rust is the language behind Embermark Forgery and the core of Mochi, so this is genuinely my own reference too. Writing it turned "I think I understand borrowing" into "I can explain why this doesn't compile" — which is the whole point.