Re: Lua Cookbook

[Peter Hickman <peterhickman386@...>]

On 4 January 2011 11:02, Alexander Gladysh <agladysh@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 13:46, Peter Hickman
> <peterhickman386@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> How does this differ from Lua Gems?
>
> Scope of articles. Gems are the cutting-edge for more-or-less
> experienced readers, recipes in a cookbook are simpler things for new
> users.

So for you a Lua Cookbook would be more of a guide to idiomatic Lua
style. Then I would also suggest not just a style guide but an
overview of the sort of common tools that a Lua programmer might work
with. Lunit, Luarocks etc. Then the question becomes what are common
Lua tools / libraries, perhaps by industry sector?

> I have an itch to write (technical articles). I'm an amateur writer,
> but some people say that my articles are not all garbage. I like
> writing about Lua — that is the subject that, I, probably, know best
> nowadays.

Mmm. If technical writing is your itch and you have a native command
of russian then perhaps a "beginners guide to lua" in russian would be
a good starting point. You could start with a series of small
introduction / how-to articles for a russian computer magazine to
build your writing skills and perhaps (with feedback from your readers
as to what they want to learn about) use that to develop your book
writing skills.

Having said that I know nothing about the russian computer press /
scene. It's just an idea :)

> But I believe that participation in a book should result in a product
> of better quality and public benefit than if I wrote some random stuff
> all by myself.

Small focused articles are much easier to write, just pick a topic and write.

* Installing Lua from source
* Extending the Lua interpreter
* Embedding Lua in C (for games programming)
* Linking C libraries to Lua
* Using Luarocks / Lunit
* Creating you own Luarocks module
* Testing / Profiling / Debugging Lua scripts
* Using databases with Lua
* Web scraping with Lua (http libraries including ssl)
* Serving web sites with Lua (Kepler, Tir, Mongrel, lighttpd)