On 14 Apr 2012, at 12:21, Alexander Gladysh wrote:
Back in the old days there were a lot less newbies. Now more and many
from the... casual layers of society are interested in Lua
programming (which is a good thing, actually). We have to cope with that :-)
Is the reference manual really the thing they ought to find though? I think it might even be harmful to direct new people to that.
A few months ago, having heard that lua was a good data description language, I decided to investigate lua/gearman as an alternative to our current rpc mechanism which is built on boost::serialization and boost asio. I'm not an expert, but I consider myself a fairly competent programmer. I found pil 5.0, but ignored it as it seemed too out of date. I found the 5.2 manual and started reading but very quickly got completely lost. I managed to get a copy of Programming in Lua 5.1 which I found quite useful - however the fact that I had lua 5.2 and the book was for 5.1 was still a quite off-putting.
I think it would be great if there were a couple of introductory chapters from Programming in Lua on the website, but written for lua 5.2. So when people are reading it, they don't think they're reading something obsolete.
Kev