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)

Functions

Global functions can be registered with Lua Bridge as well. These functions don't need to have the same signature as lua_CFunction; as Lua Bridge will generate the required glue code. Functions can be exposed with the addFunction function. This function takes two arguments. The first one is the Lua-side name of the function, and the second is a pointer to the function. The following code demonstrates how to do this:

int bar() {
return 2;
}

getGlobalNamespace(L)
.beginNamespace("foo")
.addFunction("bar", bar)
.endNamespace()

It is also possible to register functions written against the Lua C API that match the signature of lua_CFunction. You will most often do this if you need to port some legacy code over, in order to use Lua Bridge. Adding these functions works almost the same; the only difference is that the name of the function...