A growing collection of themed Rust mini-project series, built alongside The Rust Book — one small, story-driven project per chapter, each building on the last. Made for the Byte Me YouTube channel, but built to be cloned and followed along with on your own machine.
Every series in this repo follows the same idea: instead of dry, disconnected exercises, each chapter's concept gets wrapped in a running story so the concepts actually stick — and so the projects are genuinely fun to build, not just technically correct.
| Folder | Series | Status |
|---|---|---|
smiling_friends/ |
Smiling Associates: A Very Normal Friendship Agency — a chaotic friendship agency, following all 20 chapters of The Rust Book | In progress |
| more coming | More themed series will be added here over time | Planned |
Each series has its own README inside its folder with the full chapter-by-chapter breakdown (the bit, the mission, and the steps for that chapter).
1. Clone the repo:
git clone https://github.com/Barbie-Tingz/rust_mini_projects.git
cd rust_mini_projectsOr click the green "Code" button on GitHub and choose "Download ZIP" if you'd rather not use git.
2. Make sure you have Rust installed. If you don't, install it from rust-lang.org, then confirm it worked:
rustc --version
cargo --version3. Pick a series folder (e.g. smiling_friends/) and check its own README for that series' chapter list and setup.
4. Run a specific chapter. Each chapter lives as its own file in that series' src/bin/, named like ch_2.rs, ch_3.rs, etc. From inside that series' project folder:
cargo run --bin ch_2Swap ch_2 for whichever chapter you're working on.
Learning Rust chapter-by-chapter can feel dry if you're just doing the book's exercises in isolation. This repo turns that same progression into small, connected, story-driven builds — so ownership, enums, error handling, concurrency, and everything else in the book gets tied to something memorable instead of a disconnected drill.
Follow along on YouTube: Byte Me — squashing bugs one byte at a time.
This repo is primarily a learning-in-public project tied to the Byte Me channel, but feel free to fork it, try the chapters yourself, or open an issue if something in a series' instructions is unclear.