The first edition of the book is no longer actively being worked on, since we're concentrating our efforts on bringing the second edition to print. We will accept pull requests for small tweaks to the first edition; any larger work should be spent improving the second edition. Issues will likely be closed unless they are also issues in the second edition.
We're currently working with No Starch Press to bring the second edition of the book to print. Each chapter goes through a number of stages:
- We write and edit a chapter's initial content
- No Starch provides a round of edits and questions
- We revise, clarify, and check those edits
- A Technical Reviewer checks for the accuracy of technical details
- No Starch copyedits the chapter for spelling, grammar, wording, consistency
- We revise, clarify, and check the copyedits
- The chapter goes to layout, at which point only minor changes should be made
New features added to Rust will be documented in the "Newest Features" Appendix per RFC 1636. We'd love pull requests adding new sections! These sections may be incorporated into the book at some point, but we have no timeline for doing so; see the Post-publication section below for more details.
We would love issues and pull requests to the Markdown files in the src directory, up until the chapter goes to layout with No Starch. At that point, we will likely only be accepting changes that correct factual errors or major problems and not, for example, minor wording changes.
You can check which chapters have gone to layout and are frozen on the project page by scrolling all the way to the right to find the column titled Frozen.
Our open pull requests are new chapters or edits that we're currently working on. We would love if you would read through those and make comments for any suggestions or corrections!
We'd especially love help translating the second edition of the book! See the Translations label to join in efforts that are currently in progress. Open a new issue to start working on a new language! We're waiting on mdbook support for multiple languages before we merge any in, but feel free to start! The chapters in the frozen column of the project won't see major changes, so if you start with those, you won't have to redo work :)
If you're looking for ways to help that don't involve large amounts of reading or writing, check out the open issues with the E-help-wanted label. These might be small fixes to the text Rust code, frontend code, or shell scripts that would help us be more efficient or enhance the book in some way!
After the second edition of the book goes to print, here are our intentions for changes:
- The online version should stay fairly close to the printed version. For example, you should be able to look at listing 10-3 in the book and find listing 10-3 in the online version and copy-paste the code if you want to play with it. Major changes to correct errors should get documented in errata.
- There are multiple efforts starting to translate the online book into other languages. It would help the translations stay in sync if we're not constantly changing the text.
- Someday there might be a third edition, once there are enough large, new features in Rust to warrant such a thing. We don't have any schedule in mind for that though, nor have we decided if it would be modifications to the second edition or a ground-up rewrite. Until we have plans for that, we won't be accepting pull requests that aren't fixing errors, for example, changing the way something is worded.
This repository is under the same license as Rust itself, MIT/Apache2.