Comprehensive Lua Training Course

Introduction to Lua

• A brief history
• Lua's goals, features, and non-goals
• Resources for Lua documentation and tutorials
• Installing the Lua interpreter
• Setting up and using LuaRocks

Basic syntax and semantics

• Identifiers
• Comments and block comments
• Global variables and enforcing strictness
• Local variables
• Standalone programs and program arguments
• Compilation units, chunks, expressions, and semicolons

Data types and data structures

• Basic types: nil, boolean, number, string
• Object types: function, userdata, thread, table
• References and objects versus basic values
• The importance of tables in Lua

Introduction to tables and their versatility

• Tables as associative arrays
• Tables as numeric arrays and sequences

Basic control structures

• The if, then, elseif, else, end structure
• The while loop
• The repeat loop
• The simple for loop

Error handling

• Return values versus exceptions
• Converting a return value to an exception
• Converting an exception to a return value
• Error levels

Example programs

• Polynomial evaluation
• Breadth-first search
• Additional exercises

More about functions

• Named arguments
• Object-oriented calls
• Closures
• Currying
• Tail calls
• Multiple assignment and return
• Varargs

Iterators and co-routines

• The generic for loop
• Stateless versus stateful iterators
• Differences between iterators and co-routines

Metatables and metamethods

• The set example
• The __tostring metamethod
• Arithmetic metamethods
• The __index and __newindex metamethods
• The __len metamethod

Modules and packages

• Using modules
• Creating modules
• Organising modules into packages

Advanced tables

• Tables for queues and stacks
• Tables describing graphs
• Matrices as tables
• Linked lists as tables
• String buffers

Metatables through examples

• Proxies
• Read-only tables
• Memoisation
• Dynamic programming with memoisation
• The Fibonacci example

Environments

• The relationship between global variables and environments
• Free variables
• The _ENV table and the _G table

More about modules

• Different approaches to creating modules
• Modules that alter behaviour
• Module initialisation and arguments
• Using environments to implement safe modules

Advanced iterators and co-routines

• Producer, consumer, and filter patterns
• Wrapping co-routines to obtain iterators
• A stateless iterator for linked lists

Contributing to the Ecosystem

• Uploading packages to MoonRocks

Functional paradigm in Lua

• The map function
• The reduce or fold function

Object-oriented Programming

• Different approaches to OOP
• Different approaches to inheritance
• Examples

A walkthrough of the Lua Standard Libraries

Compilation

• Compilation
• Eval
• The relationship with the environment
• Binary chunks

Garbage collection

• Weak tables
• Finalisers and the __gc meta-method

Lua bytecode and virtual machine

• Generating bytecode from source code
• Reading and analysing bytecode
• A quick tour of the Lua VM source code

C modules

• Calling C from Lua
• Search path and loading of C modules

Calling Lua from C

• The Stack
• Error handling
• Continuations

Handling Lua values and types from C

• Arrays
• Strings
• Userdata
• Metatables
• Object-oriented calls
• Light userdata

Memory management

• Allocators
• GC API

Threads in Lua

• Co-routines versus threads
• Real multi-threading and Lua states