I had a similar experience. I am learning Rust, and I was following the exercises in the Rust online book chapter 8.3. The code was not working, and I was following the compiler error messages blindly - doing whatever it was suggesting, and it was leading me to nowhere.
I referred O'Reilly Programming Rust - and learned the ownership and lifetime concepts. I was able to handle the problems without much difficulty. And of course, if you are using the APIs better read its documentation, see how the API is borrowing the data - & or &mut.
Conclusion:
Learn the concepts. I have found the compiler messages useful sometimes, they usually point out the basic problem, and you have to know the concept to understand and fix the problem.