ferrous

A structured Rust learning repository — concepts, experiments, and real projects built from the ground up.

What This Is

Learning Rust by building real tools. Each phase covers core concepts followed by a project that uses them. No throwaway exercises — every project is functional.

Structure

ferrous/
├── src/                    # active scratchpad — current concept being explored
└── projects/
    ├── notes-tool/         # Phase 1 project — CLI notes manager (add, list, search)
    └── logwatch/           # Phase 2 project — real-time log file alerter with regex matching

Projects

notes-tool

CLI notes manager. Saves notes to JSON, supports add, list, and search.

cd projects/notes-tool
cargo run add "my note"
cargo run list
cargo run search "keyword"

logwatch

Real-time log file watcher. Tails a file, matches lines against a regex pattern, prints matches in red.

cd projects/logwatch
cargo run -- --pattern "ERROR|PANIC" path/to/file.log

# in another terminal
echo "ERROR: something broke" >> path/to/file.log

Progress

Phase 1 — Foundations ✅

• Variables, mutability, constants, shadowing
• Data types
• Functions
• Control flow
• Ownership
• Structs and impl
• Enums and match
• Option and Result
• Modules
• Project: notes-tool

Phase 2 — Intermediate ✅

• Closures
• Iterators
• Traits
• Generics
• Error handling
• Collections
• serde
• clap
• String types
• Project: logwatch

Phase 3 — Advanced (in progress)

• Lifetimes
• Smart pointers
• Concurrency
• Async/await
• Tokio
• Trait objects vs generics
• Custom iterators
• Unsafe Rust

Phase 4 — Open Source

• First PR merged

Setup

git clone git@github.com:VINODvoid/ferrous.git
cd ferrous
cargo run