Re: Beginner to programming. References to understand terms.

["Paul E. Merrell, J.D." <marbux@...>]

On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 11:40 PM, Bill Kelsoe [via Lua]
<[hidden email]> wrote:
> Hi,
> I have been reading PIL 5.1/RM5.1 but I just finished the first two chapters
> in PIL with some basic understanding. I found the following terms
> undescribed or briefly described in technical terms that I could not
> understand. I was hoping for a reference for a baby trying to understand
> programming for the first time of their life. For example, the lines of code
> separated by two dashes line (comment), is a chunk. An Object is part of a
> Class but I dont even know what an object is or the class to begin with.

The Lua ecosystem is not friendly to programming neophytes. (I was one
when I came to Lua.) That's a shame because it is an extremely
well-designed language and far more simple than many other programming
languages.

You can find definitions for many of the terms you listed using
Google's definition search. The syntax is:

   define:[a word or phrase that you want a definition for]

Note the absence of white space after the colon.

Also, I'll recommend a book by Karl Jung and Aaron Brown, Beginning
Lua Programming: <http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780470069172.do>.
It's aimed at Lua v. 5.1. But later versions of Lua are similar enough
that most of the book holds true for versions 5.2 and 5.3 as well.

I've advocated for a couple of years for an online version of the Lua
Reference Manual that can be annotated for beginners with definitions,
example code, and links to other resources such as pages on the wiki,
but there doesn't seem to be any energy in the community for creating
a beginner resource like that.

Best regards,

Paul

---

View this message in context: Re: Beginner to programming. References to understand terms.
Sent from the Lua-l mailing list archive at Nabble.com.