Re: First impressions and errata

On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 10:34 PM, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:

> > PiL 3 is available online, though not gratis.
>
> Oh I didn't see that! Bought it at once.

Isn't it mentioned in the Getting started page?
Anyway, how can we make the Getting started page more useful?

Hi!

The 'Getting started' page mentions the PiL book, not specifically as an e-book. I suppose I can't really blame anyone for not discovering the e-book. It's mentioned on the PiL[1] and documentation[2] pages. I only skimmed those pages and all talk and pictures of "books" just had me assume it was all physical books.

Thanks for the friendly question. I think the 'Getting started' page is generally well-formulated and looks nice. Here are some ideas:

* Something I didn't grasp quite yet is the nature and relation between LuaRocks, LuaDist, LuaToolbox, LuaPower. Since the base installation of Lua is bare-bones, a new user likely wants to use some of these. If the 'Getting started' page explained a bit what they are and what a new user should start with, that would be helpful.

* The 'Embedding' paragraph didn't make much difference to me. Maybe others find it more useful. To me, the most important info would be that the source compiles to both an interpreter with sample interactive mode, static and dynamic libraries with C and C++ header files. Adding the Lua source to your own project is sound advice, though.

* If you want to reduce the amount of text a little, the 'Welcome' paragraph is already covered by the 'About' page. On the other hand, some redundancy might not hurt.

* It could also be an idea to remind that the PiL e-book is available at once ;)

As a general observation, making sense of all third-party libraries and projects seems like the biggest hurdle when learning about Lua. I enjoy writing my own implementations as much as the next coder but code reuse is more rational. The wiki mentions many projects but gives a rather "unsorted" view. Maybe LuaPower will help with this in due time.

Regards

/Anders

[1] http://www.lua.org/pil/

[2] http://www.lua.org/docs.html