Comprehensive Lua
Comprehensive Lua
1.
Introduction to Lua
1.1.
History
1.2.
Goals
1.3.
References and Tutorials
1.4.
Installing an IDE
1.5.
LuaRocks
2.
Basic syntax and semantics
2.1.
Identifiers
2.2.
Types
2.3.
More on Strings
2.4.
Tables
2.5.
Comments
2.6.
Expressions and Statements
2.7.
Global Variables
2.8.
Local Variables
3.
Basic control structures
3.1.
The while and repeat loops
3.2.
The for loop
3.3.
Generic for loop
3.4.
Conditionals if then elseif else end
3.5.
Using break return and goto
3.6.
Using do end to delimit blocks
3.7.
Exercise on Control Structures
4.
Functions
4.1.
Variadic Functions
4.2.
Returning multiple results
4.3.
Exercise on Functions
4.4.
Named Arguments
4.5.
Closures
4.6.
Exercise on Closures
4.7.
Tail Calls
4.8.
Exercise on Functions (Polynomial Evaluation)
5.
Data Structures Using Tables
5.1.
Tables in Lua
5.2.
Arrays
5.3.
Multi-Dimensional Arrays
5.4.
Linked Lists
5.5.
Stacks
5.6.
Exercise on Stacks
5.7.
Queues
5.8.
Sets
5.9.
String Buffer
5.10.
Graphs
5.11.
Exercise on Graphs (Work in teams)
5.12.
Tables as Objects
6.
Errors and Error handling
6.1.
Stop the program on major errors
6.2.
Catch and handle errors when appropriate
6.3.
Give a stack trace with the error message
7.
Iterators
7.1.
The generic for loop
7.2.
Stateless vs stateful iterators
7.3.
Exercise on Iterators
8.
Coroutines
8.1.
Producer Consumer Example
9.
Metatables and metamethods
9.1.
Arithmetic Metamethods
9.2.
Relational Metamethods
9.3.
Library and Table Access Metamethods
10.
Modules and packages
10.1.
Using Modules
10.2.
How are modules Loaded
10.3.
Creating Modules
10.4.
Organizing modules into packages
11.
Metatables through examples
11.1.
Default Values for Tables
11.2.
Exercise on Default Values
11.3.
Proxies
11.4.
Exercise on Proxies
11.5.
Read Only Tables
11.6.
Memoization
12.
Environments
12.1.
Declaring Global Variables
12.2.
Relationship between global variables and environments
12.3.
The _ENV table and the _G table
12.4.
Classes
13.
Object-oriented Programming
13.1.
Inheritance
13.2.
Exercise on Object Oriented Programming
14.
A walkthrough of the Lua Standard Libraries
14.1.
Base Library
14.2.
I/O Library
14.3.
Table Library
14.4.
String Library
14.5.
Exercise using Strings and Pattern Matching (in teams of three)
14.6.
The Operating System Library
15.
Compilation
16.
Garbage collection
16.1.
Finalizers
16.2.
Weak Tables
17.
Lua bytecode and virtual machine
18.
Calling C modules from Lua
18.1.
LuaRocks
18.2.
Exercise Setting up LuaRocks within LDT
18.3.
Networking with Coroutines Example using LuaSockets
18.4.
Exercise on LuaSockets
19.
Create C Modules, Call from Lua
20.
Calling Lua from C
20.1.
The Stack
20.2.
Exercise on the Stack
20.3.
Accessing Lua Tables from C
20.4.
Accessing Functions through the Stack
20.5.
Continuations
21.
Memory management
22.
Threads in Lua
23.
Sample Lua and C code
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Comprehensive Lua
Goals
Simplicity - a small and simple language
Automatic memory management (versus C and C++)
Extensibility - through Lua code and external C code
Efficiency - one of the fastest languages
Portability - runs on almost all platforms