[apendleton]

Meta-answer: my default when picking up a new language is usually to learn just enough to be able to start writing code, and then learn new things piecemeal as necessary to solve whatever thing I'm working on, and it sounds like you're hoping to do something like that here.

I found that approach for Rust in particular to not work well at all, and have colleagues who've reported the same. There are some fairly complicated, fundamental concepts that are unique to Rust that I think need to be tackled before you can really do much of anything (mostly borrowing and lifetimes), and that's not immediately obvious from starter programs -- because of lifetime elision, some early programs can look deceptively familiar, but there's a bunch of barely-hidden complexity there, and as soon as you start to stray from the tutorial path, you'll run headfirst into a wall of compiler errors that you're not yet equipped to understand. For Rust I'd highly recommend just reading a book cover to cover first (either TRPL or the O'Reilly one), and then starting to write code.