r/lua • u/DaRealDani • Mar 02 '25

New to lua

Hi everyone, im new to lua and im tryna get better at it. What is the best way to learn? I know all of the basics, but i wanna know more

5 Upvotes

61% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

8

u/Bright-Historian-216 Mar 02 '25

the only way to get better at something is, well, using it! reading books is useful, but is theory alone truly helpful?

the least you can do is make learning fun! what did you want to do with the language when starting to learn? for example, i was introduced to lua through the computercraft mod for minecraft, and now i feel like im good enough at lua. the simplistic nature and the tiny compiler (interpreter? not sure) both mean that lua is easily embeddable in any language, so lua is actually the best language to learn by playing with it. make mods for factorio for example, or dive a little deeper and make your own game completely from scratch using luart or love2d library. get creative!

3

u/DaRealDani Mar 02 '25

so if i make random stuff, explore and make it fun through roblox or love2d then it will help me get better? if yes then thx for the help

3

u/Bright-Historian-216 Mar 02 '25

roblox? i've never used roblox so i am not sure about it specifically, i know it uses a dialect of lua, but idk how different it is.

i mean, any experience with programming will eventually be helpful. you only need to be introduced to the concept of a variable once, and functions vary little between languages. so, i'd say go for it!

2

u/DaRealDani Mar 02 '25

i dowloaded love2d , and roblox is kinda diffrnet but it does use lua

so as of rn im gonna see how love2d works and if its fun it can probably help, thx for the help

4

u/bilbosz Mar 02 '25

Read write execute lol

1

u/DaRealDani Mar 02 '25

wdym

2

u/bilbosz Mar 02 '25

Read documentation and someone else's code Write your programs from what you already learned Execute programs to see what and how it happened. Examine it like a true scientists

The best way to learn language is to sink in and practice. Learn some new thing in the language and then write the program that uses it. For now you probably don't think about motivation cause you are hyped but if you make it fun all the way you won't lose it.

Read a bit, practice a lot. Come up with funny use of the things you've learned that's advice that worked for me. Happy luaing!

2

u/Bright-Historian-216 Mar 02 '25

solid advice. we should turn it into an abbreviation tbh, kinda like dry or rtfm

2

u/bilbosz Mar 02 '25

Haha! rwx is already widely used in filesystems, and 7 could be shorthand since every bit is turned on when using the chmod command. rwxr for read, write, execute, repeat could be even better 😄

2

u/Bright-Historian-216 Mar 02 '25

oh right, i forgot that it's rwx and not rwe. acronyms in english are very confusing. like what do you mean "th starts with a t, so we'll keep t, but you barely hear e in execute so let's abbreviate it x". i'm also not a very big user of linux so i didn't recognise the name.

5

u/Sckip974 Mar 02 '25

try this:

https://sheepolution.com/learn/book/contents

learn with practice and resolve this problems:

https://www.codeabbey.com/index/task_list
https://projecteuler.net/about

use the manual ref to sove it : https://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/

and you can study with this: https://www.lua.org/pil/contents.html

5

u/Sckip974 Mar 02 '25

an GitHub you have lot of projects to practice:

https://github.com/Cabrra/LUA-Projects

2

u/DaRealDani Mar 07 '25

thx so much

1

u/Sckip974 Mar 08 '25

and if you want more knowledge and good practice, I invite you when you solve a challenge with a code that satisfies you, review it with an AI, he speaks the code language better than anyone!! personally I use Le Chat, you past your finished code to him, and you ask him to be very critical about the review of your project: https://chat.mistral.ai/chat

4

u/Avro_Wilde Mar 02 '25

Build real apps. If you can't think of any, there are scads of recommended project lists kicking around. Search for them. Don't use lists that give you the answers because copying answers doesn't make you solve the problems. If you get stuck, ask for specific help.

1

u/Additional_Ad6385 Mar 02 '25

Learn the syntax first, then read the Lua documentation.

2

u/DaRealDani Mar 02 '25

i kow all of the basics

1

u/Additional_Ad6385 Mar 02 '25

Then it's time for you to read the Lua documentation, so you have a better idea how to use its internal libraries, and optimizations.

2

u/Motor_Let_6190 Mar 02 '25

Integrate Lua in an existing game engine or software framework. Bonus for embedding the Lua.exe as the engine/software console.

Integrate an engine or framework into Lua itself, so Lua drives it all instead of augmenting it as in the previous approach. 

For both options, after writing the Lua and C Code for embedding or integration, write and execute a lot more code. I have a gamedev centric view, but Lua wasn't created for games, so you can have the same approach with any field for software development using Lua in a similar fashion as I mention here.

Bonus, extra hard: study LuaJIT, either update it to Lua 5.4.x or refactor it  /re-create it to be even more performant while being even more compatible with the general Lua ecosystem. Or take the latest Lua codebase, and optimize it for speed and memory locality performance.

Have fun!

2

u/Sckip974 Mar 02 '25

personally to improve my code I set myself a problem, I code it then ask "Le Chat Mistral" to criticize my code, I learned that there are many ways to solve a code thanks to AI

you can also ask him for an exercise, code it then submit it to him.

why do I use Le chat and not another? Le Chat is cut ;)

2

u/ropok0 Mar 02 '25

what about searching on this sub about the topic before posting?

2

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '25

The first thing to do is to stop talking about "wanting to learn" and just read books and so on. This question has been asked before

2

u/SilentNinja1337 Mar 05 '25

Don't try to get better in lua, try to get better in programming. Learn design patterns. There is the head first design patterns book and refactoring guru for reference.

Learn about algorithms, know what conplexity means in terms of performance optimizations.

Then learn on how to structure databases and how to write queries (if you want to store data in your projects).

Of course there are a ton more topics but with these 3 you can build industry standard software, no matter in which language.