Lua has become an important player in the world of scripting. It is the scripting language used in Amazon Lumberyard, Corona SDK, World of Warcraft, Adobe Lightroom, Love2D and many, many other systems.

Why Lua?

Lua has become so popular because it is very light weight to include as a scripting language (37K!), it is easy to learn (usually less than 20 minutes if you know any other programming or scripting language), yet powerful enough to create complex applications.

Tutorial

Part 1 of our tutorial series covers how to setup your system to do Lua development (don’t worry, it’s short and painless) and provides a little history of the Lua scripting language:

Resources

If you would like print resources, there are several books on Lua available.

Programming in Lua by Roberto Ierusalimschy, one of the lead architects of Lua.  Great technical intro to the language.

Lua 5.2 Reference Manual also by Roberto Ierusalimschy, is, as the name implies, a less expensive reference manual.  Useful for the experienced coder who just needs to look up some of the details of
the language.

Lua Programming Gems by L. de Figueiredo, W. Celes, and R. Ierusalimschy is an older (2008) collection of code snippets that can be useful.

Editor –
We used the Zerobrane editor in all of our video demonstrations.

Our books:
We have several books on Corona and Amazon Lumberyard (both of which use Lua as their scripting language):
Learning Mobile Application & Game Development with Corona – Learn to program in Lua and how to make mobile apps! eTextbook for those who are new to programming.

Beginning Mobile App Development with Corona – Introduces mobile application development for those who already know how to program.

Game Design Fundamentals with Amazon Lumberyard – For those who are new 3D Game development, this eTextbook introduces how to make a game using Blender, GIMP, and Amazon Lumberyard.

The idea of writing a textbook on the Lua Scripting language has been floated to me.  While I greatly value Dr. Ierusalimschy, our styles of instruction are very different.  Leave me a comment if you would like to see a Lua Scripting textbook.

 

Next Lesson:

Part 2: Print and Comments in Lua