100-exercises-to-learn-rust/book/src/06_ticket_management/00_intro.md

Intro

In the previous chapter we modelled Ticket in a vacuum: we defined its fields and their constraints, we learned how to best represent them in Rust, but we didn’t consider how Ticket fits into a larger system. We’ll use this chapter to build a simple workflow around Ticket, introducing a (rudimentary) management system to store and retrieve tickets.

The task will give us an opportunity to explore new Rust concepts, such as:

• Stack-allocated arrays
• Vec, a growable array type, and slices
• Iterator and IntoIterator, for iterating over collections
• Slices (&[T]), to work with parts of a collection
• Lifetimes, to describe how long references are valid
• HashMap and BTreeMap, two key-value data structures
• Eq and Hash, to compare keys in a HashMap
• Ord and PartialOrd, to work with a BTreeMap
• Index and IndexMut, to access elements in a collection