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In defense of the excellent but not-beginner-optimized Programming in Lua, its back cover describes it as "targeted at people with some programming background".
by arundelo 17y ago
In defense of the excellent but not-beginner-optimized Programming in Lua, its back cover describes it as "targeted at people with some programming background".
- jsyedidia 17y agoI also want to defend Programming in Lua, which is probably the best single book devoted to a programming language that I've ever read (only K&R comes close). I'm not alone in thinking highly of it--on Amazon, of the 30 reviews, 25 give it 5 stars and 4 give it 4 stars. The book is not really for beginners, as you can tell by the fact 30 percent or so is devoted to the C-Lua API, but since when should every book on programming be targeted to beginners? The book covers many interesting programming methodologies while giving a complete and thorough tour of the language. In fact, though, Lua is a sufficiently simple language that programming novices generally have no problem learning it, and the first third or so of PIL should get the beginner on his way very nicely.
- silentbicycle 17y agoI think the confusion may come from Lua the language being designed for / promoted as scaling downward to a simple scripting or data-description language. You can learn it in several passes, doing useful stuff with it without advanced stuff (coroutines, metatables, tail calls, the C API, etc.) getting in the way of the basics. _The Awk Programming Language_ is another slim and lucid language book. I don't use awk for much beyond one-liners (usually at that point I switch to Lua), but it has some real gems.