Free course on Microsoft Learn
Microsoft's Take your first steps with Rust is a free course on Microsoft Learn teaching Rust fundamentals. You learn syntax, ownership, error handling, and the Rust toolchain. After finishing, you understand Rust's core concepts and can write basic programs. Microsoft is investing in Rust and encourages its use in performance-critical systems. Rust is increasingly popular for systems programming and safety-critical code. The main limitation: Rust is complex. The ownership model is unintuitive at first. This course is a foundation; mastery requires practice.
Rust has been voted the most admired programming language in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey for multiple years running, most recently at 72% in the 2025 survey, and both Microsoft and Google use it in production systems today (source: Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, Admired and Desired section, survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology).
Microsoft Learn's official getting-started path for Rust. Covers fundamental syntax, the ownership model, common collections, error handling, and modules. Browser-based exercises and knowledge checks throughout. Free with a Microsoft achievement.
RustBeginner
freeCodeCamp's full-length Rust course covering syntax, ownership, borrowing, lifetimes, structs, enums, error handling, and concurrency. Build CLI tools and small projects to internalise Rust's memory model. Completely free on YouTube.
RustIntermediate
Google's free 4-day Rust course taught internally to Android engineers. Covers core Rust through bare-metal and concurrency in depth, plus Android-specific modules. Slides, speaker notes, and exercises are all open source. One of the most thorough free Rust resources available.