Find an open source project you care about that uses it then try to fix some simple issues. That's how I learned!

Write something that sounds fun. It doesn't even have to be useful to anyone, just interesting. And you have to be able to talk about it. The last person we hired for our team, I actively courted because he'd written a javascript parser (note: just a parser, it parsed basic JS to an AST and did nothing with it) and talked about it at a local rust meetup I'd been hosting (until COVID).

If you don't have local (or maybe now vitual?) meetups to go to, write a blog post about it and post it to HN and put a single sentence "I'm looking for a job that lets me write Rust professionally" note at the bottom, you never know who's going to see it.

The official book is good, and I recommend even experienced programmers read it. Ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes are really central to the language, and really handled differently from other familiar languages. The jump from "implicit and occasionally violated" notions of ownership to an "explicit and 100% enforced" notion is a big one.

Write little command line tools for yourself in it (it’s the same answer for most languages).

The embedded RustConf talk said a big thing internally at FB was rewriting stuff like existing/well-used Python scripts into Rust...

I started out by doing a raytracer, graphics programming is really rewarding. https://raytracing.github.io/books/RayTracingInOneWeekend.ht...

I learned a bit of Rust by doing Advent of Code with it. That's more algorithms than systems, but the difficulty ramp in AoC means it ends up being a good intro to the core of a language.

I did some experiments with bevy.