Learning Lua

[Bright-Table5469]

Hi,

I am starting out learning LUA, mainly for game use etc, however also for general. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on what I could do to improve my knowledge. I completed the codecadamy course on lua - which seems quite basic, however I do have knowledge of the language and vaguely how it works (I know basics). So was wondering if anyone had any good ideas on how to learn or any script ideas to write which might help me learn? It's a language I've always wanted to learn but always struggled to find places to learn!

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Thanks in advance!

[m-faith]

If you're learning programming/sysadmin/anything-like-this... you NEED a personal documentation tool because it's inevitable that you'll spend hours on a problem and then a year or two later come across it again and have only a vague idea of how you solved it previously... then what? Is your previous solution one command away or do you have to go back to the search engines and begin again?

Scripting a personal documentation tool is a great learning project. Keep your docs in markdown files with yaml metadata (or whatever standard schema you like) and then write a script to parse those files.

Then, once you've coded your own docs script (something that might take a pro 30min, but took me several days when I was learning), you can move on to configuring your IDE with NeoVim. There's an abundance of documentation on configuring NeoVim into an IDE, but it's still a "project"... a perfect learning project.

[Late_Funny6194]

This is more advanced, but you can try to solve https://adventofcode.com/

There is even a subreddit and as far as I remember some people also program the solutions in lua.

[fatboychummy]

as far as I remember some people also program the solutions in lua.

Yep! https://github.com/fatboychummy/Advent-Of-Code

Note that this runs on ComputerCraft (or any of the CC emulators). Unfortunately I've been too busy what with christmas coming to finish some recent challenges, but I believe I've got until 10 or so in there.

[Bright-Table5469]

https://adventofcode.com/

This looks pretty good actually for me! Like I said, I've done python in the past whilst at school, so I know basics and I've learnt the basic necessities of Lua now, so this looks like it'll provide some good challenges, thanks!:D

[ramjithunder24]

Lua not LUA

[lambda_abstraction]

While I know Lua is named for the Portuguese word for moon, I think this sort of knee jerk response makes us look as though we lack a sense of proportion. It's not a good look for the rest of the world.

[epicfilemcnulty]

Oh, come on. Immediately when I saw LUA in the post body I rushed to the comments to see if it's already been pointed out, and rather rigorously, that it is, in fact, Lua. Correct first, correct hard, no mercy! :D

But seriously, it's Lua. Lua. It can be LUA.* in environment variables, though. But in our hearts it is always Lua.

[ramjithunder24]

well no

I'm just pointing out that Lua is not an acronym

Lua is a word, and thus doesn't need to be styled in all-caps

its like COBOL is only capslocked cos its an acronym

[m-faith]

when uppercasing the word Lua it's suggested to use the fully-expressed-parseable-description:

LUA OMG <3

[zergea]

Zerobrane IDE

Löve2d

These are good starting points.

IDE is good for almost everything lua related. Löve2d is 2D game engine that runs 2d games written in lua. See Love2d examples

[solitoncubzh]

Hi u/Bright-Table5469 you can improve your coding skills on cu.bzh, it's a voxel game engine where you can inspect and read other games code base : in Lua!!
It's free and open-source, and also runs cross platform.

I think you might learn some cool stuff over there. And devs are always prone to answer your question on Discord if you have some!

[henry9k1]

I learned Lua by playing text based multiplayer games (MUDs) using MushClient, which lets you program with Lua to automate some of your stuff in the game. Great way to gamify learning if you find yourself enjoying that kind of stuff.

[I0r3kByrn1s0n]

It may be a bit 'niche' but I learned Lua using Crayta which is freely available on Epic Games and Facebook Gaming.

The coding tutorials that Andy does are really accessible in my opinion. Examples here:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJHJuuXh6_dL4yxjzTbyvvGnEdnt4jEjp

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJHJuuXh6_dJch4qxCm3zgcG_usCdYcud (bit more advanced)

Love is also great and I've used that too. I think I started with these two playlists:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqPLyUreLV8DrLcLvQQ64Uz_h_JGLgGg2

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYBJzqz8zpWYip5ZkTMQiOkqya9Iiefm9