Ask HN: Best book (or other media) to learn lua from?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11320276

by Sturmrufer • 10 years ago

4 5 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What it says on the tin.

4e1a• 10 years ago

I learned Lua by reading "Programming In Lua" and by searching github for Lua projects and reading them.

Vaskivo• 10 years ago

I agree. "Programming in Lua" is a fantastic book! It showcases the whole language, as it's philosophy and how to use it's more advanced features.

I have the feeling that there is no "intermediate Lua". After you grasp the basics, the next step is really advanced stuff. The book helps you make that transition.

wallflower• 10 years ago

This isn't a book obviously. However, it is the tiny Lua code that became super human at Atari.

https://sites.google.com/a/deepmind.com/dqn/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11278065

KRuchan• 10 years ago

Not a book, but if you are looking for a real-world motivation for a lua project - try out awesomewm, a window manager thats customizable using lua. You'll write some lua scripts and end up with a workspace to your liking.

amttc• 10 years ago

Hey! I really love Lua. I'd recommend reading Programming in Lua (whatever the latest edition is) and Lua Programming Gems. Unfortunately, Lua is one of those languages that isn't written about a lot because its use case is usually for embedding. You'll have to do some legwork to read how other people write Lua. You probably want to read a lot of code on Github. Olivine Labs springs to mind here as an org that uses Lua quite a bit, but there are more. I got off the Lua train at 5.1, but 5.3 adds a lot of niceties.

Depending on how deep into the rabbit hole you want to go, reading the VM source code is instructive too (it's a pleasant read at ~10kloc. I'd actually recommend reading it on the website as they've hyperlinked much of the code.)

Ask HN: Best book (or other media) to learn lua from?

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