Students: Your experience with the course

[mgeisler]

Dear people who have either taken the course or read through it as a self-study:

• What did you think?
• What worked well?
• What should we improve?

Feel free to share your feedback here!

[cangomescisco]

What did you think?

I loved the approach did you choose. Always brings practical cases to teaching the rust aspects.

What worked well?

The exercises. I like to learn a new language by implementing good examples, and you bring nice ones. I prefer to learn theory by implementing something.

You've also demonstrated that Rust's complexity can be understood. I loved the diagrams. It helped a lot in reducing abstractions and memorizing better.

What should we improve?

You can add more tips and links/resources on subjects important to completing the exercise that wasn't previously taught. For example, I spent too much time in the Polygon exercise (Day 2 Morning) understanding that I needed to implement operator overloading using traits (Day 3 Morning).

In other exercises happened the same situation, I felt a gap in knowledge to start the exercise, and I lost much time researching =/

Add instructions on how to run the tests cargo test.

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Thanks for this course 😃 ! Now I feel safer studying other sources 🦀 !

[mgeisler]

Thanks a lot @cangomescisco!

I love the diagrams too — in particular the wacky way they're implemented: moved-strings-rust.md. It's tedious to update, but oh-so-satisfying to look at afterwards in the source 😄

Your point about the exercises is good: it's something I hadn't thought much about since we normally end up talking about things like operator overloading during the 1st or 2nd day... I feel this is the biggest missing point right now for the course: you only see the tip of the iceberg if you don't have access to an instructor (#101). I hope adding speaker notes (#53) will help here!

Thanks for taking the course and letting us know about it!

[cangomescisco]

@mgeisler Do you plan to translate for other languages? I can help to translate it into Portuguese.

[mgeisler]

Yes, that's also something which is on my radar! Thanks for offering to help 😄

I wrote some infrastructure for this a few months back, but I haven't looked at it in a while: rust-lang/mdBook#1864. I hope to get back to this in some months.

[mgeisler]

Hey @cangomescisco, I've now put up #130 which would allow you to translate the course into Portuguese in a structured way. Please give is a look and let me know on the PR what you think.

[Chiogros]

What did you think?

I loved this synthetic, yet comprehensive enough course. I will certainly advice people to follow it when starting their Rust journey!
Thank you a lot!

What worked well?

The speakers notes are a game changer, bringing more "human" explanations which are really helpful.
The practical exercises, so that we have materials to experiment what we have just learned ; the Rust playground integration is a must for hacking a few lines easily.

What should we improve?

At the end of the course (starting on Day 4 Afternoon), I felt overwhelmed by all the information learned during the previous days.
I would suggest adding external links to blog posts, particular documentation sections or anything which could help understand a concept.

[djmitche]

Thanks! And, good idea -- #1678