Re: Lua Cookbook

[Axel Kittenberger <axkibe@...>]

> 4. The naïve plan:
> -- Define book format
> -- Brainstorm a list of topics
> -- Cull a list of topics to a list of articles
> -- Assign volunteer authors
> -- Formulate a submission, collaboration, editing process.
> -- Write articles
> -- ...
> -- PROFIT

I support this idea.

As far I get it, a cookbook is some sort of of book an advanced Lua
programmer will page through very quickly and put it back - "boring,
know it all." But for some people like to approach things by reading
something like this (other just open a console and hack away :-). I
would compare it to the rather sucessfull, yellow "[X] for dummies"
series. There might be some overlap to Robertos excellent "Programming
in Lua" in book. Like Queues http://www.lua.org/pil/11.4.html would
fit in the Cookbook very well. But as I see it, the approach would be
different, it would not introduce the very basics of the language, but
refer to Roberto for this, and it would organize things originating
from a common problem. Wile Programming in Lua originates from
Language features and what one can do with it.

About a collaborative friendly format.

Progit uses callibre, do not know that. I recently used asciidoc and
considered it quite ok. One is in Ruby the other in Pyhton.

Brainstorming topics, I suppose one could skim through the mailling
list to find good topics:
Reclling things out of my head
* anonymous recursion
* sandboxing
* auto magic tables
* getopt()-like solutions
* chain(like?) lists - (any list operation where random insert/delete is cheap)
* multidimensional arrays
* building GUIs
* slices (refer to penlight?)
* handling XML
* detecting loop-hanged scripts when calling from C