I'm taking my second crack at learning Rust and I have to say I've made a lot more progress this second attempt. It could be just giving things time to stew in my head, but I really think it's because I'm using rust-analyzer with vscode and before I was using RLS. Rust-analyzer is a much richer experience and its informative error messages and suggestions lessens the learning-curve drastically.
In my experience a combination of the rust book followed by the too many linked lists book was enough to give a pretty good idea of Rc, RefCell etc and how they can be used.