books

Design Patterns and Best Practices in Rust

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“There are two types of knowledge: things you remember, and things you know where to look up.” This book is a perfect example of the second type. I’ve been reading it over the last few weeks and, to be honest, it’s a bit hard to remember every single specific topic. In fact, it wouldn’t even be smart to memorize all of these things; what matters is knowing that they exist.

This book is not for newbies in software development (AI era or not). You already need to know what design patterns are, when to use them, and have a solid knowledge of the Rust language.

Every chapter provides examples. The book starts with anti-patterns and explains how to implement patterns in a Rust-specific way. You can’t just blindly rewrite code from other languages; you have to “think different” (sorry for the citation). For instance, that’s exactly why the Singleton is not a good choice in Rust.

My advice: buy the book, but don’t read it cover to cover. Use it when you need it (and you will, to quote Yoda this time).

The Rust Programming Handbook

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I read this book because I often watch the YouTube videos of the author, so I was curious to see how he uses this different medium and read something different about Rust. Obviously the book cannot be compared to the official Rust book, also because the goals are different.

It presents all the topics with good examples; at the end of every chapter there is a summary and exercises that help to better understand the different topics. I appreciated the chapters dedicated to the peculiarities of Rust, like Ownership, Borrowing, References, and the Borrow Checker, and the chapter dedicated to concurrency.

If someone asked me how to learn Rust, I would say: read the official book and afterwards keep a copy of this book on the desk as a practical guide. Just to give an honest review, I have only one doubt about the last chapter dedicated to Docker.

I wonder if it could be skipped or made shorter. In any case Francesco, you did a great job.

The Ai Con

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For irony, yesterday I finished reading The AI Con, on the same day ChatGPT 5 was presented.

As the title says, the book talks about the cons of AI: environmental issues, exploitation of people, copyright, educational problems, political problems, and so on.

I understood that a book like this can feel anachronistic nowadays (especially for AI fanboys — not for the people who really study the topic and are actual experts, but they are few), but I still recommend reading it.

One advantage of the book compared to AI is that you can hear different perspectives.

A technical blog is not a waste of time.

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Writing for developes

Often lately I thought (and maybe not only me) that maybe writing tech blog posts or newsletters is not helpful anymore (I’m talking about posts that should have some value, not clickbait ones).

This book, one of the best tech books I’ve read this year, changed my mind and gave me back the enthusiasm to keep writing.

The authors explain how to write different types of posts, using theory and real examples.
They also give some suggestions on how to use AI to check mistakes in your posts, not just grammar, but also to investigate if the post is unclear, and so on.
But they clearly say: “don’t use AI to write the post” – it must be personal, your idea, your style.

It’s not easy nowadays, and that’s exactly why it’s more beautiful.