I have to admit that I needed to go through learning material (including the book and others) over and over and over again. Sometimes when reading, it makes a lot of sense, but you quickly forget about it, and then you suddenly are confused about basic things like the difference between a struct and a trait, for example.
So my advice would be to go slow speed. Take time to review simple exercises over and over, then move on; and if you're stuck, then move back. Rust takes time to learn, at least it did for me.
With concrete problems or when some things in the teaching material don't make sense, the forum here is very helpful.
I personally made good experiences with the Rustlings course, it was a good challenge and forced me to get a deeper understanding (or move backwards to re-read the book, until I was ready to solve the exercises).
Regarding giving up: I gave up three times learning Rust, but finally I succeeded. I'm happy I came back.
If you want to move on to making some "real" programs, you could try creating a simple command line app, perhaps using rustyline and/or clap. Ask the user some information and do some calculations. That might be much easier than some GUI or network programming, yet can help you to understand Rust better in practice.