Lua Quick Start Guide

The author does a reasonable job of showcasing the language to help someone get started in LUA quickly. I am using it to help teach a beginner how to program. The languag and style is down to earth and should be accessible to most people. NOTE- This book does not teach the art of programming, it is literally just a quick-start for LUA. If you want a book that teaches the art of programming using LUA you should look elsewhere.

This book is a pithy, bull in a china shop approach to teaching Lua. If you have a small project and just need the basics then this book will probably serve you well enough. If you really want to dig in, skip it entirely. 'Programming in Lua' by Roberto lerusalimschy (one of Lua's authors) is a much more thorough and well written guide to the language.A couple examples of things that frustrated me about this book are making statements like "scopes are limited to their chunks" and then showing examples where you declare variables as local. In actuality, most variables are global by default and thus have global scope unless you explicitly declare it as local. If you are coming from most other languages, you understand scope to be local by default and stating that scopes are limited to their chunks is, in my opinion, misleading or at least not well explained. I also found that he would frequently introduce something and then just not bother to explain it. For example, 'w = 7 and 1 -- value is 1'. Why? Why isn't it "false" instead of a number. In some ways Lua seems to go out of its way to not follow conventions held in common by many other languages. More explanation of the what and why would be really helpful.The book is less than 200 pages and is uses decently large font and lots of white space which makes everything very readable but does so by sacrificing detail. So, as I said, it's probably a decent intro for a small personal or school project but if you really want to dig in, I'd put that $30 into something more substantial. ~$18 seems like a decent price point for this book. I felt $30 is much too high for what it is.

Still learning. Very informational

It covers the basic run through of the Lua code and that is just what I needed.

Nice book easy to follow.

I'm sorry, but this book does not meet my expectations. Pretty much 15% of the book is related to installing Lua, that is too much space for a quick start guide. The examples are poor and the syntax is not explained during the book, rather it is poorly introduced during the examples. There are some parts, like variables, that seems to me target to a very beginner, while other part are skipped. On each chapter there is a reminder about the need for javascript and git, but I think that the former is never used and the latter is used only to download the book examples, and therefore there is no need to waste space on this reminder on every chapter.