RE: Back to books

[Asko Kauppi <Asko.Kauppi@...>]

How about "Learning Lua in 2,4 hours" ;)

-ak


-----Original Message-----
From: Gavin Wraith [mailto:gavin@wraith.u-net.com]
Sent: 6. helmikuuta 2003 14:03
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: Back to books


I too believe that the availability of a good book on
Lua is essential for its wider acceptance. However, we have
to be careful about what we mean by "Lua".

Lua's lack of vast libraries is actually an advantage
from the point of view of learning to program. I think
Lua is a good candidate as an introductory language
for those new to programming, and it would be good to have a
book aimed in this direction. In teaching programming
re-inventing the wheel is a positive necessity. For 
actually using a language one needs to avoid this, of 
course. This contradiction is at the heart of why 
all-singing, all-dancing packages, like Mathematica, 
Maple or Matlab or NOT a good choice for teaching 
programming, because the average student comes away 
with the impression that it is all magic, and they 
never get to think it out for themselves.

In a beginner's book one would not want to deal with Lua
as a C-library, and the Lua API. That too demands a
book, but one aimed at a more technically sophisticated
readership.

There are many good books out there, and more bad ones.
Ones that I particularly admire are "The C Programming
Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie and "The AWK Programming
Language" by Aho, Kernighan and Weinberger. These two
books are extremely skillfully written, so that the
reader is not swamped by too much too soon, and neither
has any flab in it. Easiness is not always a virtue, and
the size of so many tedious tomes promising
"Learning Turbo-Monolith in 24 hours, for Dummies" is
matched only by that of the cars that the author presumes
the student must own to lug these books around.

It would be unthinkable not to include Lua's metaprogramming
facilities even in an introductory book; at least __index
needs to be explained in any chapter about object-oriented
styles of programming and the usefulness of inheritance.

So here are some imagined titles:

"Introduction to Programming, using Lua" 
"Lua and Prototypes"
"Handling Data with Lua"
"Lua as a Scripting Language"
"Lua and Games Programming"
"The Lua API"

If anybody is contemplating writing a book on Lua, in English, 
to them I reiterate my offer to check their English, for
spelling, grammar and punctuation. You will never find
such an amiable pedantry so freely offered.

-- 
Gavin Wraith (gavin@wraith.u-net.com)
Home page: http://www.wraith.u-net.com/
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