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)

Integrated development environments

So far, we have covered how to use the built-in features of Lua to debug code. To make debugging easier, several integrated development environments, or IDEs, for Lua exist. An IDE is an external application that can be used to run your Lua code. Typically, IDEs provide syntax highlighting, and sometimes code auto-completion, visual breakpoints, call stacks, and watch windows. This section will cover how to use three of the most popular Lua IDEs.

LuaEdit

LuaEdit is a simple Lua editor that offers a visual studio-like interface with similar functionality and hotkeys. This IDE features breakpoints, a call stack view, and a watch view. LuaEdit provides all the functionality one would look for...