How to learn Lua

[jhagrid77 4]

What did you guys use to learn Lua, and how did you practice it?

(Any free things are welcome)

[Gangsir 14]

Initially, when I first came across lua, it was with ComputerCraft, with direwolf20, a youtuber. I thought the mod was extremely cool, and looked into tutorials online, and direwolf20's tutorials. This increased my interest, and I learned how lua worked. I had a huge amount of practice with Java beforehand, so I already knew the programming mindset. This helped me to pick up lua within a week, just looking at tutorials and the official site of lua's documentation. After a while with CC, I found OC, realised that it was a much better, useful and balanced mod, picked up OC's version of lua, which is different from CC's. I've been churning out user-friendly mass-appeal programs onto these forums since, which I feel it lacks.

 

To practice it, I'd just recommend looking at your minecraft playthroughs, pick something you'd like to automate/make easier with computers, and throw yourself at making a program. Look up required libraries you might need, methods the block(s) in question has, etc. I've written a few that you might want to look at for inspiration, they can be found in the program showcase part of the forums. Or, someone else's. The great part about communities is that inspiration abounds.

 

A really great place to start is reading most of OC's wiki, it helps a lot with learning the mod.

 

Some links:

 

Official lua site:

http://lua.org

 

Direwolf's computercraft tutorials: (Keep in mind, CC's lua version is different from OC's, so if you're trying to learn for OC, look up Lua 5.2 tutorials)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaiPn4ewcbkHYflo2jl0OuNaHK6Mj-koG

 

OC's Wiki:

http://ocdoc.cil.li/

[Jasems 0]

I have been watching some lua tutorials online.  I think I started with the in-game lua tutorial though (I just started all this a few days ago for that printer program so not good at it yet).  

 

These videos are pretty basic and decent:

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlJftHgeByg&feature=iv&src_vid=jQ40M1DObl4&annotation_id=annotation_726684

[Gorzoid 10]

I first saw it in minecraft but I was not able to understand it, a bit later I started looking at the lua in garrys mod (and half life 2 mod with a lua framework) and that's when I started learning lua,  I mostly just read and if I did not understand what something meant I would look it up e.g. pairs() function.