I 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 c

I 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.