Currently on the final book of James Clavell’s Asia Saga, it’s been a long road and I’m frankly kind of over it but 90% through the final book and I’m glad I read them. First read Shogun maybe ~10 years ago but read the other four back to back. Gai-Jin wasn’t very good but the others have been pretty solid overall. A bit long winded and sometimes I wish he’d’ve had a more aggressive editor, but happy with em enough to finish them all.
I like his podcast a lot, brief vignettes into… whatever. Really fun production and not a deep dive into topics generally, but that’s a feature and not a bug in the context in which I listen to him
> When I'm reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I'm off.
What would you say is a good starting point for learning Rust? I’ve been curious about it for a while, but coming from a mostly Python, I’m straight up intimidated and fear wasting time trying to learn something I won’t really ever fully be competent in…
The article had great advice on this actually. When asked how to get into C, or whether it was more advisable to learn Zig instead, Mitchell suggested that
It’s more important to learn how computers work and make the language just a means to understanding how they work. [...] even in this age of higher level abstractions and web development, it’s still important to understand the basics of CPU scheduling, memory, cache hierarchies, file systems, disc and file access. When you work directly above the syscall layer, whether in C, Zig or Rust, it really helps you understand what’s happening[...]
The official rust book (officially available free online) is the way to good. So good I purchased it when it went paperback. It's a top tier language book.
Writing a Python extension would a good way to dip your toes into Rust, and also add a useful skill to Python programming (writing performant extensions). PyO3 is the main project, and the topic has been covered in several talks at Python conferences (check Youtube).
