Programming in Lua, fourth edition

A great read! It's very informative and thorough, containing end of chapter questions to test your knowledge. If you find yourself needing to learn the basics of LUA, this is a great start!

Programming in Lua is an amazing textbook. It effortlessly illuminates the "scary parts" of Lua, exposing the powerful features that are often overlooked by casual users. The read is simple and the first 18 chapters can be absorbed by anyone with basic knowledge of programming in about twenty to thirty minutes (the balance of the book outlines more advanced features and the interface to C). If you're new to programming, PIL will guide you through fundamental concepts and the examples at the end of each chapter are easy to digest. Lua has an interactive shell making it fun to test the commands as you read. If you're at all curious about Lua, this book is your definitive guide. The answers to questions about using Lua are intrinsically answered in the way the book is written. For me, the cost of the purchase has been easily outweighed by the time I have saved *not* having to search the Internet (and attempt to infer an answer from an API reference). That advantage lets me get on with writing my IoT platform and learning to script Roblox worlds in Lua with for my son.

I was looking for a simple lisp-like scripting language with C-like syntax.... was convinced I had to invent my own until I found Lua. Yes, there are a few slight warts here and there, but I am sure there are good historic reasons. The book itself is not bad at all, breezy quick read, excellent for getting the gist. If you are new to programming, this is NOT a good starting point. This book meanders through various topics and is not very good at starting at the beginning. So the examples use operators you have not seen yet and you are left guessing as to the underlying paradigm... Sadly, par for the course in this field. Just put the mysteries on your stack as you read, they will be revealed later! But hey, I am happy to learn how the original author sees things.

Lots of open source projects use Lua to configure them, like NeoVim and Wezterm. So, I needed to learn Lua. This works.

I'm new to programming and feel this was a little too advanced for me but I was able to follow through the lessons. I have a few other books I'm using and overall feel this is a great addition to my library.

I can't say that this book has any negatives, this book offered a great introduction to Lua, as Lua is an easy non-complex programming language. This book offered exercises along with the chapters, I have enjoyed learning from this book and the exercises are very fun. Highly recommend this.

This was a very good textbook. It contains the most important information about programming in Lua and has plenty of examples.

Book is of high quality on its own, but the advertised quality of "Very good" was true also (Bought used). Nothing to complain about.

Bok som är skriven på ett lättsamt språk.

This is a well-written primer on Lua by one of the language's authors. While it doesn't have the depth of a reference book, it touches on all the major topics and provides enough information to get you started without getting bogged down in excessive details. One of the bonuses of the book's author also writing the language itself is that he often explains why certain design choices were made when he and his colleagues architected Lua. Understanding the rationale and philosophies underpinning Lua really helps when learning the language, in my opinion.

A superb book for Lua lovers :-) It is a nice update to the previous version of the book, also very recommendable.

Un'introduzione a Lua molto ben fatta, competente e piena di molto buon senso. Il libro è molto ben organizzato e strutturato. L'ultima parte, quella sull'interfacciamento di C e Lua, potrebbe forse beneficiare di una scelta di esempi migliori, dato che alcuni risultano piuttosto artificiali e quindi poco coinvolgenti.

C'est *la* référence indispensable pour tous les utilisateurs de Lua, écrit par l'auteur du langage en personne. Lua est un langaeg suffisament simple pour qu'un seul livre puisse servir à la fois à apprendre le langage et de référence pour un programmeur expérimenté, en complément du manuel officiel, Si vous possédez l'édition précédente (la 3e), vous pourriez vouloir faire l'acquisition ce celle-ci pour les informations sur les nouveautés de la dernière version du langage (Lua 5.3) comme les entiers de 64 bits, les opérateurs bit-à-bit et les fonctions de manipulation de structures binaires (string.pack / string.unpack). Si vous avez une version précédente, je conseille vraiment la mise à jour. En particulier, ne vous contentez pas de la 1ere édition, disponible gratuitement en ligne, qui ne couvre que Lua 5.0, une version sérieusement obsolète.