This is actually an interesting answer. I am in the process of reading the main book as of now and I can already feel it won't be enough. I did find out recently about rustlings and that is actually quite nice to have a feel on the language. I do think however more is needed, and as you mentioned, doing small programs should help. Problem is: where to even start? I find incredibly hard to have ideas on things to do on the smaller scale that are good for learning opportunities. Also another thing I am equating to do is to actually just read existing working code of some Foss project. I still didn't find one that is good to already see patterns and other nuances, but if someone knows that would be very helpful.