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)

Operators

Operators such as addition +, string concatenation .., and even the assignment operator = have been used throughout this book. Let's take some time to cover in detail what operators are and how they work. Operators fall into one of the following categories:

  • Arithmetic operators do math.
  • Relational operators always return a Boolean value: true or false. Relational operators are used to compare the relationship between two things, for example, by checking whether one number is smaller than another number.
  • Logical operators express complex relations such as and/or. For example, logical operations can be used to check whether a number is less than seven AND greater than two.
  • Misc operators: All other operators, such as assignment, fall into this category.


Operators can be unary or binary. A unary operation works on only one operand. For example, the minus sign (...