Lua Fundamentals Training Course

Introduction to Lua

• A brief history
• Lua's goals, features, and limitations
• Documentation and tutorial resources
• Installing the Lua interpreter
• Setting up and utilizing LuaRocks

Basic syntax and semantics

• Identifiers
• Comments and block comments
• Global variables and strictness enforcement
• Local variables
• Standalone programs and command-line 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/objects versus primitive values
• The central role 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
• While loops
• Repeat loops
• Simple for loops

Error handling

• Return values compared to exceptions
• Converting return values to exceptions
• Converting exceptions to return values
• Understanding error levels

Example programs

• Polynomial evaluation
• Breadth-first search
• Additional exercises

Advanced function concepts

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

Iterators and coroutines

• The generic for loop
• Stateless versus stateful iterators
• Key differences between iterators and coroutines

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
• Organizing modules into packages

Object-oriented programming

• The building blocks of OOP in Lua
• Practical examples

Discussion on more advanced language features

• Weak tables
• Finalizers
• Compilation, evaluation, and loading