Lua for dummies?

I’m loving my Vera, but seems to really get into the cool stuff I need to learn this whole Lua /LUUP thing.

I’ve read the wiki pages and looked at the lua website. I googled for some primers but all i can find on google are guides to make weapons in video games and the like. Something to explain from the beginning rather than telling me to copy the script for a mace and make it into a nanchuk or whatever.

I need a real generic place to start to read and teach myself.

Basically I learned BASIC maybe 30 years ago on an atari 400 (stop laughing) and then had a little more of it a few years later in High School on apple II’s. In college I had a class in fortran (or was it pascal) as it was required for engineers and back then they it was all in a BOOK. you didn’t even get time on a machine. (then the mac’s came along and we had a semester about drag on drop- laughing).

So while I could totally rock at IF THEN, GOTO, and GOSUB. I’m doomed trying to follow the syntax in the scripts i look at now. (where the hell are the line numbers- lol) I seriously need a Lua for dummies website to just learn the basics and then go on from there.

any suggestions?

If you still have a good conceptual understanding of procedural programming from you Pascal days. The Lua reference manual (Lua 5.1 Reference Manual) should get you started.

I too taught myself BASIC by copy code out of the Atari manual. Mine was a 800XL.

I liked the http://lua-users.org site, specifically the first few sections of their Tutorial, which is listed in their directory:

http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaDirectory

It’s nicely structured. Stop reading it after you’ve read up to (and incl) the Patterns Tutorial… or you’ll get a headache if you haven’t programmed recently.

If you’ve worked with BASIC, JavaScript (etc) it wont be much of a leap to learn Lua. There are also command line interpreters for it on most platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux etc) which you can use to experiment a little (reminiscing about “Hello World” programs etc 8) )

Pop-quiz: Remember what BASIC stands for (without using Google/Wikipedia)?

If you don’t want to install the command line interpreter, you can use: Lua: demo

I was wrong about what the “B” stands for, but got the “ASIC” correct. I self-checked my answer on Wikipedia, as to not post my answer and ruin the game for others.

guessed - thanks for that particular link. I didn’t find it myself when i looked through the website before. that’s exactly what i was looking for.

You guys got me about BASIC- it’s been way too long. Although I think the B is for “basic” - no?

I do seem to recall that ‘fortran’ was for ‘formula translator’ but it was a while ago for sure.

;D

That’s what I thought too, but it’s not. BASIC - Wikipedia

[quote=“mikeholczer, post:2, topic:165416”]If you still have a good conceptual understanding of procedural programming from you Pascal days. The Lua reference manual (Lua 5.1 Reference Manual) should get you started.

I too taught myself BASIC by copy code out of the Atari manual. Mine was a 800XL.[/quote]

I had I think something like a 120xt, IIRC that was it’s nmae (which was sort of in the same family of the 800xl i think) after the 400. That forced me to learn to solder and built my own hardware- it was before the days of the ubiquitous net and there were little message boards you could set up yourself. But the modems of the day from atari had no ring detector so i had to built my own with some caps and a relay and connect it through the joystick port.

after that I think I had something XXXX ST- that used the same 6800 CPU from the MAC with a different OS that Atari had.

fun memories.

That’s what I thought too, but it’s not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC[/quote]

ahhhh- that’s it. :smiley:

…thought that would give you a laugh. If you want another I learnt to program on one of these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80

…maybe 30 yrs ago, that my brother borrowed from a Teacher just before I started High School. In retrospect, an odd way to spend the summer break (in Oz)

The chips that power these things are still around, and run all sorts of automation stuff at a low level. Things don’t really change that much over time.

You guys got me about BASIC- it's been way too long. Although I think the B is for "basic" - no?
GNU is probably most well known (in Software) for doing that with an Acroynm

PHP is also a recursive acroynm. Although it wasn’t originally.

To me, it’ll always be “Personal Home Page”… 8)

[quote=“guessed, post:9, topic:165416”]…thought that would give you a laugh. If you want another I learnt to program on one of these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80

…maybe 30 yrs ago, that my brother borrowed from a Teacher just before I started High School. In retrospect, an odd way to spend the summer break (in Oz)

The chips that power these things are still around, and run all sorts of automation stuff at a low level. Things don’t really change that much over time.

You guys got me about BASIC- it's been way too long. Although I think the B is for "basic" - no?

GNU is probably most well known (in Software) for doing that with an Acroynm[/quote]

Laughing – ahh the Trash 80. Yep some of my friends had that too. Didn’t it come from the rat shack?
But funny you mention chips in the same thread as the ST- that was one of my later forays into hardware hacking. You guys recall – but the kiddies wont- that before there were hard drives (NOT even floppies on those computers- laughing- bbbbbrrrrrrrrrr- bbbbeeeeeeeeep- errrrrrgggg when the cassette ‘drive’ was ‘loading’)- the OS was in chips socketed to the motherboard. At some point the macs got an OS update so you’d have to bring your mac to an authorized dealer and they would swap in the new chips for you. Well at the start of that they figured those old chips were worthless since all the new macs would come with new OS anyway. So some hacker made a little box that had whatever else you needed to put the mac os chips in your ST and get a quasi mac. It’s been a while so I forget exactly what was going on- but I got myself a set of mac chips and somehow between socketing and unsocketing (there was no ZIF) I broke one of the pins off one of the rom chips. So I balled up a bit of aluminum foil and jammed it in the socket to ‘extend’ the socket. And viola I had a macintari.

Ah, another thread with nostalgic memories… ;D ;D

http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=2924.0