Electronic version of the Lua book

[Robert Anderberg <lua@...>]

Hi,

I recently wrote to Roberto asking whether an electronic version of the Lua 
book was being considered or thought about. The reason is that, although I 
own a copy of the book, I now find myself in the situation of possibly having 
to help 20+ people learn Lua.

It's not very convenient for everyone to read the book, and people generally 
want to be able to search for information quickly at their desks as they 
work.

I certainly didn't realise how powerful Lua was until I read the Lua4 book on 
the website, and even though I was using Lua5 at the time, I learned many new 
and interesting ways to use Lua, and I then went on to build a whole game 
project around it (http://www.lua.org/uses.html#113).

While I realise that the authors of Lua wish to sell a lot of books (which is 
completely understandable and completely valid), I think that the language as 
a whole has lost something now that the kind of information that's in the 
book (and was previously avaliable on the website) isn't freely avaliable.

It's easy to look at the Lua language and miss the great things about it, the 
reference manual doesn't give you that spark of genius that the book does, 
and the wiki, while being a great resource, doesn't have the weight of 
something writtern by one of the Language's authors.

Another thing I've often thought; is there some way for people to contribute 
to the Lua project? I'm sure many companies would be very willing to donate 
funds to such a useful piece of software.

I just thought I'd make my feelings known and see what other people's thoughts 
were.

Robert Anderberg

ps.  I  apologise to Roberto for repeating many of the things I wrote in my 
mail to him in this post :)