Book Image

Lua Quick Start Guide

By : Gabor Szauer
4 (1)
Book Image

Lua Quick Start Guide

4 (1)
By: Gabor Szauer

Overview of this book

Lua is a small, powerful and extendable scripting/programming language that can be used for learning to program, and writing games and applications, or as an embedded scripting language. There are many popular commercial projects that allow you to modify or extend them through Lua scripting, and this book will get you ready for that. This book is the easiest way to learn Lua. It introduces you to the basics of Lua and helps you to understand the problems it solves. You will work with the basic language features, the libraries Lua provides, and powerful topics such as object-oriented programming. Every aspect of programming in Lua, variables, data types, functions, tables, arrays and objects, is covered in sufficient detail for you to get started. You will also find out about Lua's module system and how to interface with the operating system. After reading this book, you will be ready to use Lua as a programming language to write code that can interface with the operating system, automate tasks, make playable games, and much more. This book is a solid starting point for those who want to learn Lua in order to move onto other technologies such as Love2D or Roblox. A quick start guide is a focused, shorter title that provides a faster paced introduction to a technology. It is designed for people who don't need all the details at this point in their learning curve. This presentation has been streamlined to concentrate on the things you really need to know.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Introduction to tables

Tables are the only data structure available in Lua. The table data structure is powerful enough to implement other data structures. Tables can also be used to extend the Lua language with a class system, or even a mixin system, which is an alternative to class-based composition. So, what is a table?

Tables are basically a dictionary or array. A table is a key-value pair. If the keys to the table are numeric, the table represents an array. If the keys are non-numeric or mixed, the table is a dictionary. Anything can be used as a key in a table, other than nil. Anything, including nil, can be a value.

Creating tables

A table in Lua is created with the curly brace {} symbols. After a table is created,...