I’ve been coding for years in a multitude of languages, but other than one c class I had in college I mostly learned through osmosis, or learned new things as they were needed.
So my knowledge is honestly all over the place and with a ton of gaps.
I’m trying to learn rust and starting going through The Rust Book and afterwards I plan on going on Rust by Example and trying to code my stuff as strictly following best practices as possible.
Is that a waste of time? I mean rawdogging it has been working for me for a decade now. Should I just yolo and write what I wanna write in Rust and learn as I go?
It depends on what you want to learn. One book won’t teach you everything there is to know about a language.
Decide on what area of the language you want to learn more about and then try to find a book that focuses on conveying that.
Otherwise you may spend a bunch of time learning something you don’t care about. You don’t need to know everything about a language unless you have a specific reason for why you want or need that knowledge.
The depth you go into a language will dictate where you need to go to gain the knowledge you’re seeking, if that makes any sense.
A simple 2-3 hour breeze through online documentation may be all that you need to get by. Or maybe a deep dive into serialization is needed because the kind of project you’re on and therefore finding a few books on that subject will be required.