> crab-in-a-human-skull cover

Anyone know the story behind this?

Rust community members are known Rustaceans which is a play on the word crustacean. Crabs are a well-known crustacean. Crab in a human skull is a visual metaphor for learning Rust.

I got a Hamlet vibe from it when I picked the book up when it originally released. It could just be because it looks pretty sick though

Alas, poor Yorick; I knew him well, Ferris.

(Slightly more seriously, the project to replace the borrow checker was called Polonius[1], so it wouldn't be the first Hamlet reference in Rust land.)

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/polonius

To follow up that movie reference with the response in a different movie where that line is misquoted, “Where’d you hear that, a renaissance festival?”

I haven’t seen that movie a lot, but that scene (and really the entire movie) has been seared into my consciousness for 30 years. It was just the exact thing I wanted at that point in my life.

I do not know the story, but I remembered the book because of that, and now after having mentioned it here, I just bought it.

So my n=1 study indicates it was a successful design. :)

Author here!

To be fair, there is no particular backstory. I picked a hermit crab as the book logo since crabs are strongly associated with Rust due to Ferris, Rust's mascot. I then landed on that style (and the skull) because they looked sick and distinctive. The cover images of many technical books are incredibly dull these days.

IMO thats a better reason than "long winded explanation of symbolism" :D

Also the same one who is making a new web server framework for Rust called Pavex, which is apparently pretty novel in how it works compared to others like Actix Web and Axum [0][1].

[0] https://www.lpalmieri.com/posts/a-taste-of-pavex-rust-web-fr...

[1] https://blog.logrocket.com/using-pavex-rust-web-development/

> Pavex is in beta, so you need to activate Pavex with an activation key: > You can retrieve an activation from the Pavex Discord server’s #activation channel after you’ve joined the beta on Pavex.dev.

Open beta is coming! A few more months of polishing, and then I'll open the floodgates.

To be fair, he did say it was "pretty novel"...

Nitpick but a project can be finished and feature complete and still be "pretty novel in how it works". The solution is what's novel in that sentence.

Here’s a great podcast episode with the author discussing Pavex, etc.

https://rustacean-station.org/episode/luca-palmieri-pavex/

Oh nice ! I bought this book and forget to finish it for life reasons but it was really enjoyable.

Book’s name doesn’t lie , it’s literally the author taking you by the hand along the path of building a real application with real problems on a real production environment explaining everything from the basics of the language to how to keep it online.

The book is pretty opinionated (because well, since it guides you until production giving you basically all the code, choices are needed) but the author always takes the time to explain its choices and what the alternatives are.

I’m feeling like I want to come back to this book.