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)

Debugging Lua

In the last chapter, you learned how to use some of Lua's, built-in modules and how to create your own module. At this point, you know most of the libraries and concepts Lua has to offer. This chapter will help you understand what to do when unintended bugs creep into your code.

Some of the properties that make Lua extremely powerful also make it easy to introduce unintended bugs. Sometimes, even the simplest of bugs can take a significant amount of effort to fix. Lua provides powerful debug libraries that help make these bugs easier to track down and resolve. In addition to debug libraries, a number of great external tools also exist.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following topics:

  • The debug library
  • Error-handling in Lua
  • Profiling
  • Integrated development environments