## Welcome to the Rust Crash Course: An Introduction This lesson serves as an introduction to our Rust Crash Course. We'll outline what you can expect to learn, what topics fall outside the scope of this particular course, the primary reasons for taking this journey—especially if you're interested in smart contract development—and the foundational knowledge you'll need to get started. ### What You Will Learn In this course, our goal is to equip you with a solid understanding of several key areas of Rust: * **Basic to intermediate Rust:** We will cover the fundamental concepts of the Rust programming language, building your skills up to an intermediate level of proficiency. * **Ownership and borrowing rules:** These are often highlighted as a potentially confusing part of the Rust programming language. We will address these crucial concepts early in the course. This approach will provide you with ample opportunity to apply them as you write Rust programs throughout the subsequent lessons. * **Async / await programming:** Towards the end of the course, we will briefly touch upon asynchronous programming in Rust using `async` and `await`. #### Topics Not Covered To keep this crash course focused and effective for its primary goal, certain advanced Rust topics will not be covered in detail. These include: * Closures * Smart pointers * Concurrency * Threads * Channels * Mutexes The decision to exclude these topics is driven by our focus: learning enough Rust so that you can confidently write smart contracts in Rust and audit smart contracts that are written in Rust. Our aim is that by the end of this course, you will possess a solid understanding of Rust, making these advanced topics significantly less difficult to learn on your own should you choose to explore them further. ### Why Should You Take This Course? The primary motivation for this course is to empower you to: * **Write and audit Rust-based smart contracts.** This course is specifically designed to provide you with the Rust knowledge necessary to engage with smart contract development and auditing on prominent blockchain platforms. The skills you gain will be directly applicable to ecosystems such as: * Solana * Arbitrum Stylus ### Prerequisites To make the most of this Rust Crash Course, you should have some foundational knowledge and be comfortable with certain tools. We assume you are already familiar with the following, as these concepts will not be explained in this course: * **Basic programming concepts:** You should understand fundamental ideas such as variables, functions, hash maps, and similar programming constructs. * Prior experience with programming languages like Python, JavaScript, C, Java, or others will be beneficial. * **Command line basics:** We will frequently use the terminal to compile Rust code and execute tests. Familiarity with navigating and using the command line is expected. * Please note: In this course, all demonstrations will be performed using a Linux terminal. * **Using an IDE (Integrated Development Environment):** Code examples and development will be demonstrated using a code editor. Familiarity with using an IDE is assumed. * Please note: In this course, VSCode will be used as the primary IDE. Okay, these are the prerequisites. Next, let's move on to course setup.