Lua Fundamentals 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 construct
• The while loop
• The repeat...until loop
• The simple for loop

Error handling

• Return values versus exceptions
• Converting a return value into an exception
• Converting an exception into 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

Object-oriented programming

• The building blocks of OOP in Lua
• Examples

Discussion on more advanced language features

• Weak tables
• Finalisers
• Compilation, eval, and loading