book

This repository holds the source of "The Rust Programming Language", the canonical introductory book for the Rust language. The finished book is published in print by No Starch Press and is also available for free online, shipped alongside the stable, beta, and nightly Rust releases (though those bundled copies may lag behind fixes made here). A releases page provides downloadable code for all the listings that appear in the book. The book is authored in Markdown and rendered with mdBook, the Rust community's static-site generator for books. Building requires installing a specific mdBook version (matching the one pinned in rust-lang/rust's rustbook tooling) via `cargo install mdbook --locked --version <version_num>`, then running `mdbook build` to produce a static site in the `book` subdirectory, viewable in any browser. The README documents browser launch commands for Firefox and Chrome across Linux, macOS, and Windows (both PowerShell and Cmd). Tests for the code examples live under `packages/trpl` and are run with `mdbook test --library-path packages/trpl/target/debug/deps`. Contributions are welcome through the CONTRIBUTING.md guidelines, but because the book is printed and the maintainers aim to keep the online version close to the print edition, revisions are batched around Rust Editions releases. Between those larger revisions, only strict error corrections are merged, so non-error pull requests may wait months or years. Translations are tracked via a Translations label and new language efforts can be opened as issues, though merging awaits mdBook's multi-language support. A `ci/spellcheck.sh` script plus a `ci/dictionary.txt` dictionary support spellchecking, with false positives (such as identifiers like `BTreeMap`) added to the dictionary in sorted order. Overall, this is a documentation and educational project rather than a runtime tool: its value to users is as the authoritative learning resource for Rust, with a well-documented build pipeline, testing harness for code samples, and a structured contribution and translation workflow.