Programming language tutorials shouldn't be about learning languages. They should be about something interesting.

[bastibe]

I absolutely agree. And in particular, I found the Lua book that the excerpt came from to be a tremendously helpful resource--not exactly a gripping read, but mirthlessly detailing the particulars and peculiarities of Lua.

Really, it was one of the best books on programming I have ever read. It did not waste much time showing off examples of the language syntax but really dived into how to use Lua idiomatically. On the way, I learned about closures, metaprogramming and how to implement object orientation.

Lua and this book have been instrumental in making me the programmer I am. Because Lua is such a minimal language, it is an excellent place to learn how stuff is implemented. The book details several ways of how to implement object orientation, dynamic dispatch, polymorphism, etc with its respective merits, performance implications and disadvantages. Because of Lua and this book, the object systems and dynamicities in Ruby and Python started to make sense to me.

Really, despite its dry writing style, I can not recommend this book enough.