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On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 19:53, Marc Balmer <marc@msys.ch> wrote:
> Am 27.04.11 17:24, schrieb Alexander Gladysh:
>> On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 15:02, Tony Finch <dot@dotat.at> wrote:
>>> Alexander Gladysh <agladysh@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> Newbies who don't understand metamethods should read PiL
>>> before consulting the reference manual. It sounds to me like you are
>>> asking for a description similar to http://www.lua.org/pil/13.4.1.html

>> Sadly, PiL is commercial, so it is much less available to the users.

> That is amongst the most st*pid things I ever heard.  To you know how
> much time and effort it takes to create such an oeuvre?  If you don't
> have the few dollars left to buy this excellent book, then I really
> wonder what you are eating at the end of day.

Please tone down. How is this remark related to the question being discussed?

I do not critique Roberto for making the PiL commercial — it is indeed
a huge amount of effort to write such book.

All I'm saying is that in presence of the freely available manual,
most newcomers would go for it first and will think about getting PiL
much later if at all. You know that PiL is so great only after you
actually read it.

Expecting people to do otherwise is naïve.

Alexander.

P.S. I own PiL 2, Lua 5.1 manual and Gems books in the dead tree
versions. And I would have bought them even if they were freely
available online (as in fact I did with the Manual).