Re: Requesting Suggestions for intermediate/advanced book on Lua

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Jay Glascoe once stated:
> 
> I realize now I need the community to help me understand what kind of Lua
> book they could look at and recommend to a hacker friend.  Perhaps together
> we can write the next Snakes on a
> Plane<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_on_a_plane> :
> o)

  I took a look at what you have and my initial reaction was "an OO example
using animals?  Why?"  

  While I think OO is overused (personal preference), if you are going to
teach OO principles, then please, please, please, use a real world example
of OO and not some abstract nonsense version of it using shapes, vehicles or
animals.  There are plenty of real-world examples of OO design.  One I might
suggest (and this can be done as a simple example) are devices.  Windows,
Linux, Mac OS-X, all have a hiearchy of devices.  At the base you have a
base (virutal if you are using C++) class Device that supports two methods:

	read()
	write()

>From there, you have three major branches---block devices, which transfer
data in fixed size blocks, so it adds 

	seek()
	total_size()
	block_size()

character devices, which stream data and might add methods such as

	get_speed()
	set_speed()
	ready_to_send()
	data_available()

and the third branch is network (for lack of a better example), which can't
seek, you really can't set the speed, but does transfer data in blocks that
can vary in size, so you might get

	max_block_size()
	min_block_size()
	ready_to_send()
	data_available()

And finally, you get the classes that actually provide implementations, like
a IDE drive, or a SCSI drive, or a serial port, keyboard, ethernet card and
so on.  

  It's something tangable.  It's based on a real-world example.  And you
could show, for instance, that a serial port IS-A character device, but a
keyboard HAS-A serial port (to handle the actual IO).

  But please, get away from the traditional OO examples of shapes, vehicles
and animals.  

  -spc