Re: Help i'm new

["Jim Whitehead II" <jnwhiteh@...>]

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 1:05 PM, Jim White <mjwhite948@gmail.com> wrote:
> First let me say I am surprised at the number of responses to my posting.
> Second, as I stated I am new to this so there is a learning curve. Third,
> contacting anyone through the contact list only resulted in being sent to
> this forum. Fourth, I am running windows xp and the selection to download
> totals 6. Being new I have no idea what the differences are. Fifth, I chose
> Lua because the G15 logitec key board allows you to use Lua script. It
> seemed like a good idea at the time. My thought was if they recommend it
> should be easier to get my projects to run on it easier. As stated I have
> messed around with this for over a month. Emails to the contact list
> resulted in nothing of value in regards to help. Frustration does come out
> in my posting and for that I am sorry. I do how ever stand behind my comment
> that quality is lacking. This language is being represented as an "easier"
> one to use and learn. wanting to learn to program is going to be frustrating
> enough without the added problem of figuring out what down loads are needed
> and how to configure them. All help files tend to expect you to have a
> knowledge of your needs. When your new you don't know what your needs are.
> As for now being a problem for python forums, well it is my hope that after
> a month of learning via tutorials, I will be able to learn far more than
> just getting the language installed. One last thought. If you who have
> responded to my post, had no knowledge of programing, would you find it easy
> to get this up and running. Pytoin took ten minutes Lua took me a month with
> no help from the contact list other than to pawn me off on you guys. Thank
> you all for your thoughts on my post. I will trouble you no more. I hope
> python works for me so I don't have ask any questions in a forum only to be
> told what I know. I am learning and frustrated after a month of no
> help,being blown off by contacts and ridiculed for venting. I still with all
> this response, leave with  no idea how to get it to work.

Jim, I don't see any posts that you've made previously to this
discussion list so I'm not sure which "contact list" you keep
referring to.  Could you please let us know where you've been posting
and why you chose to post there instead of here?

A simple post here asking how to get started with Lua would have
garnered you the following response:

A good place to start with Lua is a book called "Programming in Lua".
Although the free online edition is for an earlier version of Lua, it
still has quite a bit of relevance to the current version.  In
addition there are the following physical books you could read:

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Lua-Second-Roberto-Ierusalimschy/dp/8590379825/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210162278&sr=8-2
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Lua-Programming-Programmer/dp/0470069171/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210162278&sr=8-1

The first being the updated version of "Programming in Lua" and the
second being a great book that teaches you how to obtain Lua for your
system, and gives you a really good series of instruction and
examples.

If your needs are more specific, we can probably point you in the
right direction.

As for downloading and installing Lua, since you're on windows your
easiest bet is to use LuaBinaries (linked from the main page at
http://www.lua.org/download.html).  The "Packaging" page there
explains what each of the files are, and should help you choose the
correct one (http://luabinaries.luaforge.net/packaging.html).  You
would be looking at the following for a normal 32 bit Windows machine:
http://luaforge.net/frs/download.php/3134/lua5_1_3_Win32_bin.zip

If you'd rather try Lua out online, you can do this via the two online
interpreters that have become available in the past few months:

http://www.lua.org/cgi-bin/demo
http://wowprogramming.com/utils/weblua

Hope that helps!