RE: Lua overview/tutorial at XGDC'01 & Manual bugs

[Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@...>]

Michael Cuddy wrote:
> I'm putting together an outline for a Lua tutorial at the Xtreme Games 
> Developer's miniConference (xgdc).
> 
> While I'm no LUA expert, I'd really like to evangelize the system
> to those attending.
> 
> The format is ~50 minutes of talk, and there's alot of ground to cover
> (I'm thinking of requesting two slots ;-)
> 
> I've put up the abstract and outline for the course on my web site,
> and I'd like to get comments from this list about them.  Have I missed
> something big?  Do you think I'm trying to cover too much ground?
> Do I have bad ordering on some topics?
> 
> The talk will cover Lua 4.1, which I expect to be generally 
> available--or i
> very close to it--by the time the conference rolls around 
> (September 29-30).
> 
> The URL for the outline and abstract is:
> http://www.fensende.com/~mcuddy/ltn/xgdc3
> 
> For those interested in the conference, which is held at the Santa Clara 
> Convention Center (in the Silicon Valley, CA), check out 
http://www.xgdc.com

I would introduce Tag information (and perhaps GC) much later, after a
global overview of the language. I see them as "advanced features", not easy to
grasp for a beginner, and when I first read the manual, I was quite confused by
the early introduction of these tags.
And beside, I think you should talk about "methods" before introducing the
tags for these methods.

Otherwise, seems OK. If you plan to publish the text of your speech on the
Net, don't forget to share the information with us.

-----

Out of curiosity, Luiz (or Roberto or Waldemar), why did you choose .. as
concatenation operator? I mean, it is often + (ambiguous) or &, but two dashes?
Why not three?

-----

Note: I reread the manual, and saw two little "bugs". Still there on the
on-line manual, so I though I should signal them anyway:

- Lua stand-alone chapter.
There is a \rm between the -e option and its parameter, probably a vestigal
part of the mark-up language you used. Doesn't show in the 4.1-alpha version.
<DT><B><TT>-e</TT> \rm<EM>stat</EM></B><DD> executes string
<CODE>stat</CODE>;

- Manipulating Tables in Lua
In the phrase "To read the value of in a table, the table must reside
somewhere in the stack.", the "of in a" seems strange.

In Roberto's book, I also spotted a little mistake. Page 151 (chapter 22),
the set_field function is called with a table parameter comming from who know
where, and indeed the function is defined with only two parameters.

Great work, a bit frustating by the blanks left to fill, I hope we will soon
see the whole book!

Regards.

-- 
--._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.--
Philippe Lhoste (Paris -- France)
Professional programmer and amateur artist
http://jove.prohosting.com/~philho/
--´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`--

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