Packt Lua Quick Start Guide

For context: I have been a professional software developer for a decade, and am now learning Lua as a hobby. I am halfway through the book as I write this.The book feels like somebody asked an AI to create an intro book from the Lua specification - only that an AI probably would have done a better job.The explanation of the logical or operator is factually contradictory and wrong. The explanation of iterator functions is incomplete and useless.More so, I don’t know who the target audience is supposed to be. The examples are too basic and longwinded for an experienced developer, and not explanatory enough for a beginner. There are places where the book basically says “if you really want to understand this, read the specification”.The whole book feels soulless and lazy, and bloated for what it does.There must be better books out there.

Still learning. Very informational

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.

I had never coded in Lua before and was disappointed by the astonishing lack of detail throughout the book. There were only a few examples in each section and topics were not covered thoroughly, books like this should be written with the assumption the reader is not familiar with what you are talking about. There are no files with the book that the reader can follow along with, I ended up using online resources and only referring to the book occasionally in order to complete my project.