The Rust community is large and multi-faceted. It's so large, in fact, that it can be hard to know where to go with questions or ideas. More, books at the intermediate to advanced level will often assume that readers know as much about the language community as the author does. Having been mostly on the other side of the author, reader relationship I've always found this assumption frustrating. As an author, though, I now understand the hesitancy—none of the community information will stay up to date.

Oh well. Some of this information may be out of date by the time you get to it. Reader beware. 

Throughout this book, we've referred to the crates ecosystem; crates.io (https://crates.io/) is the location for Rust source projects. The docs.rs (https://docs.rs/) is a vital resource for understanding crates, and is run by the Rust team. You can also cargo docs and get a copy of your project's dependency documentation locally. I'm often without Wi-Fi, and I find this very useful.

As with almost all things in Rust, the community itself is documented on this web page (https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/community.html). IRC is fairly common for real-time, loose conversations, but there's a real focus on the web-facing side of Rust's communication. The Users Forum (https://users.rust-lang.org/) is a web forum intended for folks who use the language and have questions or announcements. The compiler people—as well as the standard library implementors, and so on—hang out on the Internals Forum(https://internals.rust-lang.org/). There is a good deal of overlap in the two communities, as you might expect.

Throughout this book, we've referenced various RFCs. Rust evolves through a request-for-comments system, all of which are centralized (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs). That's just for the Rust compiler and standard library. Many community projects follow a similar system—for example, crossbeam RFCs (https://github.com/crossbeam-rs/rfcs). These are well worth reading, by the way.