Gabor Szauer - Lua Quick Start Guide

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First published: July 2018

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Gabor Szauer graduated from Full Sail University with a bachelor's degree in game development. He has been making video games professionally since 2010. He has worked on games for the Nintendo 3DS, Xbox 360, browser-based games, as well as games for iOS and Android. Gabor loves to teach, especially game development and programming. He has previously written the Game Physics Cookbook and is looking forward to producing much more content for those who want to learn.

Jayant Varma is an author of books on iOS development (Swift, Objective-C, and Xcode); Bash & Lua was his first book. He has been the technical editor for several Packt books. An academician at JCU, he mentored students for the Apple Swift Course at RMIT. He was the IT manager for BMW & Nissan, and as a development manager for an ASX-listed company, he contracted and built several mobile apps for small-to-large organizations in Australia. He has conducted workshops and spoken at meetups and events. He started OZApps and provides consulting and development services.

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Lua is a small, powerful, and extendable programming language that can be used to learn to program, write games and applications, or as an embedded scripting language. This book is the easiest way to learn Lua; it introduces you to the basics of Lua and helps you understand the problems it solves.

You will work with the basic language features, the libraries Lua provides, and powerful topics such as object-oriented programming. Every aspect of programming in Luavariables, data types, functions, tables, arrays and objectsis covered in sufficient detail for you to get started. You will also find out about Lua's module system and how to interface with the operating system.

After reading this book, you will be ready to use Lua as a programming language to write code that can interface with the operating system, automate tasks, make playable games, and much more. This book is a solid starting point for those who want to learn Lua and then move on to other technologies, such as Love2D, to make games.

This book is for developers who want to get up and running with Lua. This book is ideal for programmers who want to learn to embed Lua in their own applications, and is also ideal for beginner programmers who have never coded before. Starting with an introduction to the Lua language, you will learn how to create variables and use loops and functions. You will learn advanced concepts, such as creating an object-oriented class system using only Lua tables. We look at the standard Lua libraries and learn how to debug Lua code. We will use Lua as an embedded scripting language and learn about the Lua C API in detail.

, Introduction to Lua, serves as an introduction to Lua by answering the question what is Lua? Next, the chapter walks the reader through downloading and installing the appropriate Lua binaries, as well as Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code is the code editor we will be using throughout this book to edit Lua files.

, Working with Lua, is a primer on the basics of the Lua language. For those who have not programmed before, this chapter teaches the basic concepts of programming, such as variables, loops, and functions. For the more experienced programmer reading the book, this chapter serves as an introduction to Lua's syntax.

, Tables and Objects, states that the most powerful features of Lua are its table and meta-table systems. Through these systems, the language it self can be extended. This chapter focuses on exploring what tables are, how they work, and how they can be used to extend the language to support concepts such as object-oriented programming.