Learn Grunt, Microsoft and Rust

In this course, Chris takes a README-driven approach to build out a Rust CLI that supports content authoring for a digital garden.

Specifically, you'll work through the first command for the CLI, writing files. You start by initializing a new Cargo binary crate through creating the `write` command that allows you to create files (and their contents) to the folder that you set. 

Step by step you'll learn about:
- Handling user input
- Error handling
- Rust Move semantics
- Rust Copy semantics
- Integration testing

...and more!

Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.

rust

Creating a Digital Garden CLI with Rust

Rust is a modern language that is close to the metal. It's got the performance of C, but with a more friendly syntax and community.

It's also memory safe, and ensures your applications are bug free by catching errors at compile time instead of runtime.

These features make Rust a great choice for developing code for embedded systems, web servers, and CLI apps. You can even compile Rust into WebAssembly in order to run it in-browser!

But as the saying goes, "before you learn to run, you must learn to walk".

In this course, you will write your first Rust application.

Starting from “Hello World” you’ll quickly move on to learning about Rust’s types, configuration files, and the `cargo` package manager along with classics like functions, loops, and handling user input.

More Rust-specific concepts like macros and pattern matching will also be introduced.

Check out these [**community notes for this course on Github**](https://github.com/eggheadio-projects/write-your-first-program-with-the-rust-language).

Next Steps: [Basic Types in Rust](https://egghead.io/playlists/data-types-in-rust-ab72)

Write Your First Program with the Rust Language

[Rustlings](https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings) is a set of exercises that serves as a great introduction to the Rust language. It covers many concepts from the [Rust book](https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/) by asking you to work through sets of exercises.

This collection walks you through Rustlings in a way that explains what's going on in each exercise. We cover everything from basic types to generics and threading.

Learning Rust by Working Through the Rustlings Exercises

This collection contains videos that explore the basic types in Rust, including **Fixed size Integer**, **Pointer sized Integer**, **Boolean**, **Strings**, **Characters**, **Arrays**, **Tuples** and more.

If you're just starting out learning Rust and [wrote your first program](https://egghead.io/courses/write-your-first-program-with-the-rust-language), this collection is the right place to get more familiar with the language!

Basic Types in Rust

Many languages work on a compilation story to WebAssembly, but Rust is already ready for primetime. Why?


- Rust is a stable language and great replacement for C and C++. 
- Due to the reference and borrowing concept, Rust doesn’t need a Garbage Collector and can be used for a production-ready WebAssembly project. 
- The Rust/Wasm team has built some sophisticated tooling for straightforward interoperability between Rust and JavaScript.

This course gives you the tools to compile to WebAssembly with Rust. Over 11 lessons, we’ll set up a project and explore various paths of communication and interoperability between Rust and JavaScript.

Using WebAssembly with Rust

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

Task automation is critical for any AngularJS single-page application. Grunt gets the job done.

Introduction to Grunt for Angular

grunt

GruntJS allows you to use underscore/erb style templates to reduce repetition and create variables. This is commonly used to point at build folders and files within your application's structure.

Template

In this lesson John will show you how to start using Grunt Uglify to compress your javascript for production deployment.

Uglify

Grunt Multitask allows you to write complex tasks that run multiple targets. In this lesson, John will show you how to use Multitask in your GruntJS builds.

Multitask

You can use Grunt to combine all of your Javascript files into a single concatenated file.

Concatenating Your Javascript with grunt-contrib-concat

For production we want to use minified javascript to reduce the payload that is sent from the server. This can easily be accomplished with grunt-uglify.

Minifying your output with grunt-uglify

In this lesson John will show you how to get started with grunt-contrib-watch. Watch is an essential component of any Grunt build, and you will find yourself using it in almost every project. 

Grunt Watch

Grunt will clean up your build with the grunt-contrib-clean to make sure that no artifacts from previous builds are hanging around.

Cleaning your build folder with grunt-contrib-clean

With Grunt you can automate core tasks for your AngularJS project. In this lesson we will take a look at converting Stylus files to CSS, and add a watch task to convert those files automatically whenever a change is detected.

Development Automation Tasks with Grunt

Build and watch ECMAscript 6 using traceur compiler and Grunt.

traceur compiler and Grunt

In this lesson John will show you how to create a simple external config file for your GruntJS build.

External Config

Lightweight yet powerful IDE, perfectly equipped for complex client-side development and server-side development with Node.js.

webstorm

In this lesson you will install GruntJS and get up and running with your first task, initial configuration, and how to get Grunt methods auto-completing in WebStorm.

Introduction to Grunt

Microsoft Windows is a group of several graphical operating system families, all of which are developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry.

microsoft

For a production Windows server it makes sense to run NodeJS applications as a Windows service.  This way they can be automatically restarted if the server is rebooted.

It also makes it easier to use monitoring tools like datadog to detect if there are issues with the service which is critical for production systems.

Install a Node.js Application as a Windows Service

Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.

express

To replicate your production application its helpful when developing a local NodeJS Express application is running under SSL. 

There are some web technologies which do not play nicely with standard http and its likely to become more common e.g. Web Push Notifications.

This lesson will show you how to create a local SSL certificate for localhost and then convert it into a format that will work with Express.  It will also show you how to make sure that Chrome will trust it.

This lesson is for Windows as it uses a powershell command, as well as the Microsoft Management Console (MMC)
 

Create Local SSL Certificates for an Express App on Windows

In order to setup a project we need to install the nightly build of Rust and add the WebAssembly target. For an improved workflow we also install the CLI tools wasm-pack and wasm-gc.

Setup Rust for WebAssembly

In this lesson we are going to setup a project from scratch by introducing the JavaScript snippet to load a WebAssembly module. We demonstrate two different ways and showcase the benefit of the streaming solution. Once the module is loaded we can invoke a function previously exported from our Rust code.