Re: [Proposal] Simplified Lua Reference

[Paul Merrell <marbux@...>]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 11:01 PM Robert Burke <sharpobject@gmail.com> wrote:

Certainly not. It just seems like this proposal is an incremental

improvement to the existing thing, and I would like a much different
thing.

I would love to see another beginners' book written like the one for Lua v. 5.1. [1] But all we have are cursory or abandoned projects for Lua beginners. [2], [3], [4], [5] Another such book would be my ideal. But to my knowledge, no one is working on that. And I've written books before; it's a painful amount of work. I'm not expecting anyone to volunteer for such a task. 

I've been rooting for an annotatable version of the Reference Manual because it would be a lot less work to get started and the work could proceed incrementally. For example, Dirk Laurie has a good start on a glossary that could be linked to terms in the Manual, to make it more understandable for beginners who aren't familiar with the language involved. [6] And there are lots of wiki pages that could be linked, with a lot of example code snippets available scattered around the Web that could also be linked. E.g., [7].

Would it be ideal? Far from it. But it provides an organizing framework for annotations. And I think it would be far more useful to beginners than what we have now. 

Best regards,

Paul

[1]. <https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Lua-Programming-Kurt-Jung/dp/0470069171>.

[2]. <http://www.troubleshooters.com/codecorn/lua/>

[3]. <https://github.com/stevedonovan/lua-gentle-intro/blob/master/readme.md>

[4]. <https://web.archive.org/web/20150427044003/http://lua.gts-stolberg.de/en/index.php>

 

[5]. <https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/lua/topics>.

[6]. <https://rawgit.com/dlaurie/lua-notes/master/glossary.html>.

[7]. Category: Lua, at RosettaCode.org. Hundreds of Lua code snippets   

Lua Cookbook, at GitHub Social Coding. Still in the planning stages but bookmarked here to check later.  
Lua Snippets at http://snippets.luacode.org/. More than 100 high-quality Lua snippets.
Lua Tutorial Directory at Lua-users.org. Good tutorials, lots of snippets.
MUSHclient Lua forum. Web forum for a game implementation of Lua, with excellent Lua tutorials and a multitude of code snippets.  
Pastebin.com. Include "lua" in your search query. Caution: Some content on Pastebin.com disappears quickly. Clip and save any useful snippets you find there.
Sample Code at the Lua-users.org wiki. Meta-index to sample Lua code on the web site.
Snipplr Lua code snippets.

Stack Overflow. Answers to about 750 Lua questions as of 25 January, 2011, often including Lua snippets. Include "lua" in your site search query.   

--

[Notice not included in the above original message:  The U.S. National Security Agency neither confirms nor denies that it intercepted this message.]
                                                ¯\_(ツ)_/¯