Comment by QuarkSpark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by QuarkSpark | Hacker News Reader

This tutorial hasn't been updated in a long time (~1 year) Honestly, I haven't learnt anything significant about Lua from this tutorial.

Lua was initially designed as an embedded scripting language.The most popular applications built using Lua are games! It's also used a lot in building plug-ins, most often embedded into other languages. This tutorial explains nothing significant about meaningful programming using Lua : how to write functions? how to build Tables(most important data structures in Lua) Arrays? Object-oriented programming in Lua?

Lua was a boon to game enthusiasts with no programming experience. Can an amateur even start developing the simplest of games using this tutorial? I think not.

I am a big fan of Zed Shaw's tutorials, and if one wants to follow a similar trend, they should be more consistent with updating their material for everyone.

I opened it up thinking, "wow, I might finally get a good idea of how to configure my old Awesome install."

From the first bits I read (up to the arithmetic bit), I think it falls into the pitfall of rambling about boring stuff and not getting straight into it.

Yeah, aspiring programmers need to know the difference between a comment and a string. Do they need to see a several page explanation of a comment and a string put in different places? Hell no.

Do they need to see how their script can do the same things a basic calculator does? If they're learning programming, then credit them with some intelligence.

How about a basic app that does something useful? We have so many APIs available to use now, and while it might be difficult to put them in a printed book (the API might not be around forever), I can think of few things more engaging than, say, replacing the 'Hello world' with a simple Twitter timeline fetching script.

Through that one example you can explain functions, types, variables, control structures, and documentation, and establish a solid base for delving deeper into the language and what you can do.

This will of course test the skill of the author more than it will test the patience of the eager learner. No bad thing.

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