We covered so many topics in this chapter. We got to know a bit about the history of Rust and the motivations behind the language. We had a brief walkthrough on its design principles and the basic features of the language. We also got a glimpse of how Rust provides rich abstractions through its type system. We learned how to install the language toolchain, and how to use rustc to build and run trivial example programs.

In the next chapter, we'll take a look at the standard way of building Rust applications and libraries using its dedicated package manager, and also set up our Rust development environment with a code editor, which will provide the foundation for all the subsequent exercises and projects in this book.