There is a new edition of the book and this is an old link.
Patterns are a special syntax within Rust for matching against the structure of our types, complex or simple. A pattern is made up of some combination of literals; destructured arrays, enums, structs, or tuples; variables, wildcards, and placeholders. These pieces describe the “shape” of the data we’re working with.
let x = Some(5);
let y = 10;
match x {
Some(50) => println!("Got 50"),
Some(y) => println!("Matched, y = {:?}", y),
_ => println!("Default case, x = {:?}", x),
}
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