Resources for Learning Lua ( and programming in general )

[Guppy]

A brief overview of programming

 

So what is programming anyway? It's a way for you to impose your will on the computer.

See computers are very, very stupid and completely docile so they will follow any instruction from anyone - this is also why your computer can get viruses/hacked/etc, it cannot tell the intent of the code or who instructed it to do something. ( You would do well to remember this once you start getting bugs in your code ).

 

Lets take an example - on your shampoo bottle it most likely says "Lather, rinse, repeat" given those instructions a computer never finish washing it's hair.

 

But enough dry theory stuff;

 

Lua & programming in general

 

http://luatut.com/

 

This is a great site because there is a functional lua environment built right into the page so you don't even have to worry about setting that up or having to alt-tab back and forth - just hit ESC and you can follow along the examples.

 

This is the most efficient way of learning - basically "monkey see, monkey do", by actually typing out the examples you will get more involved and thus remember it more easily.

 

Unfortunately while great it's also rather brief - so where do you go from here?

 

Well fire up the Leadwerks editor and start looking at the scripts there - try to figure out what each does, and then change them to do something different. Maybe try to change that that 1 to a 2 and see if you can figure out what you change means before hitting run.

 

I've already said it but let me re-iterate; getting into the code and just fooling about is the best way to learn, years of formal education sitting listening to a professor drone about the principles of programming only really succeeding in one aspect - giving me a common vocabulary to talk about programming with other programmers, the actual learning I did on my own ( and many years before going to university at that, so don't let your age stop you either ).

 

One typical concern is "what if I mess up and it wont run?" - well Leadwerks got you covered there, simply create a "mucking about" project and once you messed it up completely delete it and create a new.

 

Lua as it specificly relates to Leadwerks;

 

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/tutorials/_/script/

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/documentation/_/command-reference/

 

Leadwerks user Aggro has a series of short videos titled "Project saturn" in which he goes through the steps of making a game:

 

 

I'm not really a fan of learning programing from watching videos because it's so inactive, but these are usually short enough that if you watch it and immediately start to try it out it should be fresh in memory.

 

Even more resources

Have you come across an online resource that you found helpful in learning? feel free to leave a comment with the information below.

[Rick]

My 1 on 1 training sessions. Some people are using them and enjoy them and there is nothing like learning directly 1 on 1 from a real person. I mean it's what we do for our children from K-College after all

 

Plus I'm making a developer diary series for making my Halloween Game Tournament here where I go over making the entire game.

 

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/10771-halloween-game-tournament-2-hgt2-dev-diary-videos/