Lua Programming Gems is a collection of articles that capture some Lua best practices as well as clever solutions to difficult problems. The book contains gems related to both game and non-game contexts. Algorithms, data structures, and design patterns are all covered in an easy to follow, comprehensive style.
Lua is a lightweight, small, compact, and fast programming language designed as an embeddable scripting language. This cross-platform interpreted language has a simple syntax with powerful data description constructs. It has automatic memory management and incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping. Lua tries to help you solve problems with only hundreds of lines, or even less. To achieve this aim, Lua relies on extensibility.
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This article recommends free books to help you master programming in Lua. As the range of good free books is fairly limited, I close the article with a few carefully selected tutorials that are genuinely useful.
In recommendation 3. Lua for Beginners by ignatz, he wants the beginner to work in Codea. My grandson has access to Roblox Studio on his desktop computer, but not Codea. Will Roblox Studio be suitable for this learning process? If not, where does he download Codea for his desktop computer?
Read our curated lists of great free programming books. Learn Java, C, Python, C++, C#, JavaScript, PHP, and many more languages.
Lua is a scripting language used in many industrial applications, with an emphasis on embedded systems and games. Two key points in the design of the language that led to its widely adoption are flexibility and small size. To achieve these two conflicting goals, the design emphasizes the use of few but powerful mechanisms, such as first-class functions, associative arrays, coroutines, and reflexive capabilities. As a consequence of this design, although Lua is primarily a procedural language, it is frequently used in several different programming paradigms, such as functional, object-oriented, goal-oriented, and concurrent programming, and also for data description.
Lua (/ˈluːə/ LOO-ə; from Portuguese: lua [ˈlu.(w)ɐ] meaning moon) is a lightweight, high-level, multi-paradigm programming language designed primarily for embedded use in applications.[3] Lua is cross-platform, since the interpreter of compiled bytecode is written in ANSI C,[4] and Lua has a relatively simple C API to embed it into applications.[5]
Lua originated in 1993 as a language for extending software applications to meet the increasing demand for customization at the time. It provided the basic facilities of most procedural programming languages, but more complicated or domain-specific features were not included; rather, it included mechanisms for extending the language, allowing programmers to implement such features. As Lua was intended to be a general embeddable extension language, the designers of Lua focused on improving its speed, portability, extensibility, and ease-of-use in development.
Lua is commonly described as a "multi-paradigm" language, providing a small set of general features that can be extended to fit different problem types. Lua does not contain explicit support for inheritance, but allows it to be implemented with metatables. Similarly, Lua allows programmers to implement namespaces, classes, and other related features using its single table implementation; first-class functions allow the employment of many techniques from functional programming; and full lexical scoping allows fine-grained information hiding to enforce the principle of least privilege.
Tables are automatically assigned a numerical key, enabling them to be used as an array data type. The first automatic index is 1 rather than 0 as it is for many other programming languages (though an explicit index of 0 is allowed).
Extensible semantics is a key feature of Lua, and the metatable concept allows powerful customization of tables. The following example demonstrates an "infinite" table. For any n, fibs[n] will give the n-th Fibonacci number using dynamic programming and memoization.
Although Lua does not have a built-in concept of classes, object-oriented programming can be emulated using functions and tables. An object is formed by putting methods and fields in a table. Inheritance (both single and multiple) can be implemented with metatables, delegating nonexistent methods and fields to a parent object.
Besides standard library (core) modules it is possible to write extensions using the Lua API. Extension modules are shared objects which can be used to extend the functionality of the interpreter by providing native facilities to Lua scripts. Lua scripts may load extension modules using require,[19] just like modules written in Lua itself, or with package.loadlib.[21] When a C library is loaded via require("foo") Lua will look for the function luaopen_foo and call it, which acts as any C function callable from Lua and generally returns a table filled with methods . A growing collection of modules known as rocks are available through a package management system called LuaRocks,[22] in the spirit of CPAN, RubyGems and Python eggs. Prewritten Lua bindings exist for most popular programming languages, including other scripting languages.[23] For C++, there are a number of template-based approaches and some automatic binding generators.
In video game development, Lua is widely used as a scripting language by programmers, mainly due to its perceived easiness to embed, fast execution, and short learning curve.[24] Notable games which use Lua include Roblox,[25] Garry's Mod, World of Warcraft, Payday 2, Phantasy Star Online 2, Dota 2, Crysis,[26] and many others. Some games that do not natively support Lua programming or scripting, have this functionality added by mods, such as ComputerCraft does for Minecraft. In addition, Lua is also used in non-video game software, such as Adobe Lightroom, Moho, iClone, Aerospike and certain system software in FreeBSD and NetBSD, and is used as a template scripting language on MediaWiki using the Scribunto extension.[27]
In 2003, a poll conducted by GameDev.net showed Lua was the most popular scripting language for game programming.[28] On 12 January 2012, Lua was announced as a winner of the Front Line Award 2011 from the magazine Game Developer in the category Programming Tools.[29]
I saw power of LuaLaTeX through several examples on the TeX Stack Exchange site. Could you suggest some books or other resources to learn Lua programming? I want to learn about variables, loops, conditionals, string operations, writing functions etc. in Lua which then I can use in LaTeX. 2ff7e9595c
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