Enhancement: Please use complete programs rather than code snippets.

[haziz]

While working through the book, I find it frustrating that all the examples given are essentially in the form of code snippets. This combined with the general "fussiness" of the rustc compiler (I realize this is by design), makes working through the examples fairly difficult for a newbie to the Rust language. Giving the examples as full "working" and "compilable" programs would make working through the book much easier. After the full program listing a breakdown of the individual statements, concepts and segments, as code snippets can then be done. I would refer to K&R's The C Programming Language as an example of what I mean.

I do realize that the online version of the "book" has these "play" buttons that do help with some sections. However, for those of us that prefer to type the code in, or occasionally when lazy to just cut and paste, into a working editor and then compiling the code, dealing with why rustc is unhappy with our attempts to wrap enough code around the example code snippet sufficient to produce a compilable, working, program is quite frustrating.

[eddyp]

As a person bit by some snippets of interesting Rust (not in this book), I agree with spirit of the proposal, in the sense that where the complete code would be too much, to have at least some convention that we write the snippet as a full fn example() -> () definition.

If parameters are necessary, then put them in the signature of the function and their definition before, if they are custom types. E.g.

struct Foo {}

fn example(f: &Foo) -> Option<Foo> {
...
}

This should also include before the function definition any use statements necessary for the example, if necessary.

[awulkan]

I haven't read that much yet of the book, but I liked how it was done with the guessing game part. The code snippets were still small and to the point, but I'm the end you were provided the source code for the full program.

Edit: I just noticed that the code examples that appear to be incomplete had arrows in the top right corner where you can expand the code box to see the full code.

[carols10cents]

We plan on extracting all the code examples into their own files that will be runnable and complete, but pull in only the relevant code to display. Then you'll be able to follow along with the runnable examples. There's some mdbook enhancements/bug fixes we need, though, so this is blocked upstream for now.

[JManInPhoenix]

I am brand new to Rust and about 3/4 of the way through "the Book" and really like what I am seeing. I was wondering about the source code for the examples/listings in the book. Like Haziz, I too learn best by typing in direct from the book initially. I do like to have the author's full listing/source available in case I get jammed up then I can compare between mine and author's to see where I went wrong. If the complete source code for all listings in the book does become available, please post a link.

Also I want to express my thanks to everyone in the Rust development community. The documentation, books and tutorials I have found thus far have all been excellent.

[carols10cents]

Thank you for your kind words! We are working on this and the upstream issues.

[carols10cents]

Ok, I've done the work of extracting all the code snippets into complete programs in directories you can go into and cargo build or cargo run or cargo test as appropriate.

This work is in #1949, if you want to use these files right now, the easiest way is probably to clone this repo, check out the extract-files branch, and look in the listings directory.

Because we want to use mdbook's include feature to bring the code from the file inline so that the code in the text and the code in the files don't get out of sync, and because of this mdbook issue, the extract-files branch can't be merged until this mdbook PR is merged and released, and the mdbook version that builds the book in rust-lang/rust is updated.

[JManInPhoenix]

Awesome! Thanks very much for the source code - this is very helpful to me. Much appreciated!!!