Ask HN: Best book (or other media) to learn lua from?

I learned Lua by reading "Programming In Lua" and by searching github for Lua projects and reading them.

Hey! I really love Lua. I'd recommend reading Programming in Lua (whatever the latest edition is) and Lua Programming Gems. Unfortunately, Lua is one of those languages that isn't written about a lot because its use case is usually for embedding. You'll have to do some legwork to read how other people write Lua. You probably want to read a lot of code on Github. Olivine Labs springs to mind here as an org that uses Lua quite a bit, but there are more. I got off the Lua train at 5.1, but 5.3 adds a lot of niceties.

Depending on how deep into the rabbit hole you want to go, reading the VM source code is instructive too (it's a pleasant read at ~10kloc. I'd actually recommend reading it on the website as they've hyperlinked much of the code.)

Not a book, but if you are looking for a real-world motivation for a lua project - try out awesomewm, a window manager thats customizable using lua. You'll write some lua scripts and end up with a workspace to your liking.

This isn't a book obviously. However, it is the tiny Lua code that became super human at Atari.

https://sites.google.com/a/deepmind.com/dqn/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11278065