The Lua 5.1 short reference provides a concise summary of the Lua syntax
and core libraries. The 2nd draft of the updated 5.1 version can be
downloaded from either the lua-users.org wiki:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaShortReference
or from my website:
http://thomaslauer.com/comp/Lua_Short_Reference
Background: like many amateur bean-counters, I am a big fan of reference
cards, especially for hard-to-remember technical obscurities, such as
the finer points of Perl regular expressions or the blasted mod_rewrite
syntax. I stumbled across the Lua 5.0 reference card by Enrico Colombini
a couple of months ago and found it to be a very valuable tool. It was a
little out-of-date, though, and so I thought I could do a quick update.
Enrico kindly agreed to supply his files and notes, so thankfully I
could build on sound foundations, with the hard work already done. I
have tried to include all important changes for Lua 5.1, corrected some
minor bugs and typos and changed the layout so that the whole thing now
prints on four pages (A4, for the time being). It looks more cramped
than does Enrico's version but then again, it's a reference card and not
a literary work.
THIS IS AN EARLY DRAFT! There are certainly errors and omissions to be
found in this draft. Please, everyone who uses this card -- take the
time and trouble to send a bug report if you happen on something that
needs correcting. (BTW, the exclusion of deprecated language features
(like table.setn()) is by design.)
Acknowledgements: Enrico and I are grateful to all the good people who
contributed with notes and suggestions, including John Belmonte,
Albert-Jan Brouwer, Tiago Dionizio, Marius Gheorghe, Asko Kauppi,
Philippe Lhoste, Mike Pall, Virgil Smith, Ando Sonenblick, Nick Trout,
Clemens Wacha, Blake T. Garretson and of course Roberto Ierusalimschy,
whose “Lua 5.1 Reference Manual” and “Programming in Lua” have been our
main sources of Lua lore.
Update February 2008:
* I have corrected a few minor glitches.
* I also prepared a second version with the same text, but only one
"logical" page per physical page (the original version has two
"logical" pages per physical page). The conversion was done in a
quick-and-easy manner: I refrained from re-formatting all tables,
instead I just changed the layout and the orientation. This version
prints on six pages as compared to the original four.
Please direct all comments, bug reports et cetera to the lua-l mailing
list or to thomas.lauer@gmail.com.
