Prelude

Hello and welcome! As we embark on this expedition through the realms of distributed systems with Rust as our trusty guide, I want to set a few things straight.

First off, while Rust is a fascinating language with a powerful standard library, we won't be confining ourselves strictly to it. There are brilliant minds in the Rust community who've developed libraries that make our lives significantly easier. So, instead of reinventing the wheel, we'll often be leveraging these existing tools. That said, I promise to dive deep into the concepts behind them whenever it's enlightening to do so.

This book is a blend of my passion for distributed systems and my journey of learning Rust. I aim to offer a balanced mixture of foundational knowledge and hands-on Rust examples. While it's tempting to hand-code everything from scratch, sometimes it just makes more sense to use tools that have already been forged, tested, and refined by the community.

In this shared journey, you'll see the meshing of theory with practical Rust coding. We'll be pragmatic, focusing on understanding and applying more than purely building from scratch. After all, understanding the 'why' often leads to a better 'how'.

Let's dive in, explore together, and make the most of the tools and knowledge available to us!