So I've been studying for the last several months since late of 2025.
I' started on the rust programming book as recommended.
I tend to learn quickly with the concepts and such while I am learning and I take my time with every sentence and word.
My downside is I haven't taken any notes.
Anyway, It's been a lonely road, the more I think about it and I have been getting discouraged recently that I started to fall back into old patterns and avoiding studying.
Every time a mere thought of writing a piece code to make my life a little easier, I get discouraged but when I study I do feel a lot better.
Recently I have been back n forth on chapter 13 because I feel like I should learn something else than programming.
What isn't making much sense to me is, how little know I know about the programming world.
I picked it up because it seems applicable for my life and if I get decent at it, I'd eventually be able to apply in a lot parts of my life.
I see, system programmers, or stuff that earns you the big bucks and total respect to that.
But i get discourage because that's usually all I see. I don't wanna earn big bucks in programming but I do want to be good at programming.
So that's why I am trying to see what other's people, "light at the end of tunnel" experience has been?
When you are already at chapter 13 of the official tutorial book, you should be ready to start an own medium size programming project. That is what I typical did when learning a new programming language. Today it might be a bit difficult -- it is not easy to find projects that not already exist, and are still manageable for a single person. And motivation is another problem, when AI can do all that quite well.
Or, you might get one of these project orientated books, like "Command-line Rust", "Secrets of Rust", or maybe "Rust in a month of lunches", or books like that. Most Rust books are unfortunately quite bad, but can still be useful for a few people. I would not read the official tutorial book one more time -- I did that, and it was a bad experience, as the book is too verbose for a second reading. Unfortunately I made the mistake marking all the week parts of the book, but not the important and good ones in the first reading. End of this year the third edition of "Programming Rust" by Jim Blandy should appear. The second edition was quite good, so you might consider reading it. Doing Rustlings course, have a look at online sites like "Rust by Example", or similar stuff can be useful as well. I personally like learning with AI help, e.g. I ask how we would solve a specific task, or ask them how I could improve my own code, or use AI to understand code of others. Finally, I can still recommend my "Rust for C-Programmers" book -- I consider it still as a quite good compact text, and you should be able to use it as a Rust repetition and to expand your understanding.
I had been programming for many years in C, C++ and a bunch of other languages. All that time I had one eye looking out for an alternative to C and C++. Something with more sophistication than C but without the ever-growing insanity of C++. Then I had a new little project to do and I noticed Rust had arrived. I had a pretty good idea how I would tackle that project in C or C++, I had done similar before, and I was confident it could be done in Rust. So I set about learning some Rust from the Rust book and starting on the project at the same time. It worked out well, performance was very good, there never appeared any strange random bugs that needed debugging as often happens in C or C++. That project went into production and has been running flawlessly ever since.
That was six years ago. I had probably only learned half of the Rust language to get the job done. Many Rust projects later I still don't know much about a lot of Rust. Macros for example. And I probably don't write Rust in the skilful way many do. I don't worry, things work, they perform very well.
So the light at the end of my tunnel is not visible, I stumble along through the tunnel with my flash light illuminating this and that as I go.
ask yourself: why do I learn programming, why do I learn rust?
"being good at", "to be better", these are not a good motivation, how good? good for what? how good is better? better compared to whom?
if your goal is to achieve, then do some real projects, don't wait until you "mastered" the language. the truth is, very few people can master a language. as you develop your projects, you just learn along the way, and gain valuable experience.
if your goal is for satisifaction, do you have ton of fun programming in rust? if so, why not take every opportunity to write some rust code when you need something to be done anyway? if not, maybe find a different language. there's no single best language for all, everyone is different.