Firstly, we've lately been thinking about how to introduce Rust to experienced programmers and these are the topics, in roughly this order, that we believe are critical to teach:

Stack vs. heap, values, copying
Ownership (front and center)
Borrowing
Copying vs. Moving (and the notion of Pods for copying)
References vs. values, and their relationship to ownership and stack/heap allocation
Lifetimes (specifically taught in terms of returning borrowed fields of a struct)

It's impossible to understand Rust without grasping these concepts, and the earlier and more frequently they are taught the better.

Then there are a number of practical subjects that all Rust programmers need to know to write real code:

Vectors vs. Slices
Structs, enums, and pattern matching
Also covered in passing, with links to guides for further info: fns, impls, basic types, using libraries, Option, generics

For an example of how to teach Rust I recommend watching Niko's recent talk

Rust relating to other languages

One good resource is Rust for C++ programmers.

I consider Rust to be a multi-paradigm systems language, not specifically functional, not specifically OO, but drawing influence from both. The biggest influences are probably C++ and ML. It's design is influenced by existing languages, but more importantly by practical experience solving problems of memory safety, performance, and concurrency in large-scale software (Servo). To that end it deviates from precedent established in other mainstream programming languages, introducing the key concepts of ownership and borrowing.

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