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Help on how to learn Lua/Love the best.

Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2012 12:13 am
by Java
Alright, well i have looked at the Wiki, and its just hard for me to grasp love. and i want to better learn myself so i can fully understand this code. i would probably have to learn lua, obviously. so i was wondering how should/could i start out and learn the best? thank you in the future.

Re: Help on how to learn Lua/Love the best.

Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2012 1:20 am
by MarekkPie
Programming in Lua is probably the best online resource available.

Re: Help on how to learn Lua/Love the best.

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 4:27 am
by lots_of_birds
What did you already tried ?
Do you already know other programming languages, or is it your first.

More details could help us to make a good response

Re: Help on how to learn Lua/Love the best.

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 4:38 am
by veethree
Learning lua for me was pretty easy since i had some experience with programming before i got into the whole game programming thing. But i'd say the best way to learn if you have no prior experience is first find some tutorials. There's a guy here on the forums (baconhawka7x) who i is making video tutorial series on löve, Don't think he's abandoned that yet. You could check that out for the basics. Another great source of tutorials is the wiki. I personally learned most of the basics there.

Once you got some of the basics down try making your first game. I'd recommend something like a pong or breakout clone.

You can also learn alot from reading other peoples code. Find some simple game in the projects and demos section and look over the code. you could check out my game "pop", I'm pretty sure it's the simplest game i've seen on here to date.

Re: Help on how to learn Lua/Love the best.

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 5:09 am
by tsturzl
Lua is pretty easy. What threw me for a spin was the way the object oriented system worked, but now I actually really like it. I was so used to C++, python, ruby, and php's OO style that lua was a bit odd to learn.

Love is pretty easy to learn also. Just read some tutorials on the wiki.

Re: Help on how to learn Lua/Love the best.

Posted: Mon Jun 24, 2013 8:19 pm
by anorak
I wrote a Lua tutorial aimed at people who already know one programming language (or more) and want a fast and friendly introduction to Lua. It's called Learn Lua in 15 Minutes.

Re: Help on how to learn Lua/Love the best.

Posted: Tue Jun 25, 2013 12:42 am
by shatterblast
I stole this link from another thread, but I found it useful.

http://nova-fusion.com/2012/08/27/lua-f ... rs-part-1/

Re: Help on how to learn Lua/Love the best.

Posted: Tue Jun 25, 2013 1:33 am
by batatinha
@tsturzl
Lua do not have built in OO, the odd thing about every Lua OO is that is a workaround made most of times with metatables, which is such a pain in the ass... But if you really want it, there is libraries that make it a lot easier because it look like you're really creating objects, not copying metatables, but i don't know how to install libraries on Love.

Creating from the scratch with metatables:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/SimpleLuaClasses
(didn't checked the entire tutorial, but look like fine)

Library:
http://code.google.com/p/lua-class-lib/

Re: Help on how to learn Lua/Love the best.

Posted: Tue Jun 25, 2013 5:35 am
by scutheotaku
batatinha wrote: Lua do not have built in OO
Well, technically that's not completely accurate. Lua does not have built-in class based object oriented programming, instead it has prototype based object oriented programming. I wouldn't consider Lua an object-oriented programming language (like C++, C#, Java, Objective-C, and PHP), but it does definitely have built-in support for OOP (with prototype-based OOP being just a few lines of simple code away, just as with, for example, Javascript).

In my opinion, by-far the best resource for learning how to OOP in Lua is the "Object-Oriented Programming" chapter of Programming in Lua, which brings you through the different type of OOP attainable in Lua. You can read it here (only read this if you have a good understanding of Lua tables - a topic well-covered earlier in this same book): http://www.lua.org/pil/16.html

Re: Help on how to learn Lua/Love the best.

Posted: Tue Jun 25, 2013 10:44 am
by kikito
anorak wrote:I wrote a Lua tutorial aimed at people who already know one programming language (or more) and want a fast and friendly introduction to Lua. It's called Learn Lua in 15 Minutes.
I just want to say that this is actually very good! Congrats!