I enjoyed parts of the is book, and I really wanted to love the whole of it. I really love the meandering rabbit-hole filled discussion of technical topics, and I don’t have a systems programming background so I was excited to learn more than just Rust here.

Unfortunately, I feel like some of the chapters and their projects landed much better than others. Building a chip8 emulator was really strong and the topics covered felt like the projects really nailed home some low level systems topics. But others like the clocks and timing chapter missed for me, and I’m not sure I understand NTP or time-keeping or any better than I did to start. I think chapters like the latter teach you to work with a specific framework or library implementation, and so the details talked about and hinted at but never shown actually take away from learning the core Rust features of the chapter (and those features would benefit from a more direct discussion as a result)

There are a handful of creative diagrams, illustrations, and figures and like the other content these help sometimes and end up a nonsensical distraction other times.

I’d have trouble recommending this whole book, but I’d definitely encourage folks to read bits and pieces that interest them alongside deeper discussion of Rust topics elsewhere.