In my opinion, once you have learned the basics (and a few advanced topics) of programming, you are already 40-50% into learning any other new programming language. If you feel reading a book is a waste of time, skim it to learn the syntax while you work on projects and come back to it when you are stuck on something. Also programming books often have sections about best practices and common mistakes, make sure not to skip those.

Generally the Rust Book, even in comparison to most languages, is considered to be very good and it is the expected way to learn the language. It won't teach you everything, but it does give you a very solid foundation. The Rust community has put considerable effort into their learning materials.

The Rust Book helped me realize that I wasn’t likely to just learn Rust by doing as I had done with many other languages. I fucking love Rust but it is a bit of an oddball and the book is a great way to start.

I first started from just reading "teach yourself" books. But I would say most of the actually useful shit I learned was just by sheer brute force fucking around with my own things and learning by doing.

Reading the rust book is a great use of your time. Rawdogging is a good method if you're just concerned with things you're working on. You can also read documentation on different things that you may not be working on, but know is a gap in knowledge. For me that was the async and tokio books as async rust is a bitch.

A lot of rust libraries use the same approach by having some type of "book" for documentation. I treat them like normal reading, so I'll be out and about or just sitting and I'll pull one out and read it leisurely. It's another way I've found to learn by osmosis. Doesn't even have to be something I'm working on, just something interesting. It sounds like you're doing what interests you, and that's what's important.

It depends on what you want to learn. One book won’t teach you everything there is to know about a language.

Decide on what area of the language you want to learn more about and then try to find a book that focuses on conveying that.

Otherwise you may spend a bunch of time learning something you don’t care about. You don’t need to know everything about a language unless you have a specific reason for why you want or need that knowledge.

The depth you go into a language will dictate where you need to go to gain the knowledge you’re seeking, if that makes any sense.

A simple 2-3 hour breeze through online documentation may be all that you need to get by. Or maybe a deep dive into serialization is needed because the kind of project you’re on and therefore finding a few books on that subject will be required.