Programming In Lua

What Hacker News says

1. soapdogOct 2025
   It all depends on what you been exposed to in the past, right? I find Lua simple because it is a minimalist language in which there are very few things to learn. You can buy "Programming in Lua" for the version you want to use and with a single book you learn about basically all of the language and its internals. That is not the same with some other languages.
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2. ufoOct 2025
   Definitely include Roberto's Programming in Lua book in your list. Specially if you'd like to script Lua together with C. The book has a good primer on the Lua-C api in its latter half.
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3. fidotronJun 2025
   The book about Lua (Programming in Lua) is a masterpiece, and one of the essential programming books.

   If I could write that well in my first language I could probably triple my income. To do it in a second one is just incredible.

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4. ufoJun 2022
   For Lua documentation, I recommend the Programming in Lua book, from Roberto Ierusalimschy (lead Lua dev). The most recent edition is from 2016, after 5.3 came out, but that's ok because the language hasn't changed much since then.

   http://www.lua.org/pil/

   Another helpful reference is the reference manual. As far as reference manuals go, Lua's is fairly easy to follow and not as dense. (I still have nightmares from reading the Javascript reference manual)

   https://www.lua.org/manual/5.4/manual.html

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5. RapzidJan 2021
   I believe there is value in learning Lua, and reading Programming In Lua in particular, early on. It's object and inheritance system is in your face. I feel learning it afforded me a more intuitive understand of prototypal inheritance systems.
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6. wahernJan 2021
   Never mind Lua tutorials. Just read the manual, https://www.lua.org/manual/5.4/, and maybe the canonical Programming in Lua book, https://www.lua.org/pil/

   Lua is an incredibly simple and elegant language. All the myths and bike-shedding on Stack Overflow and elsewhere can only lead you astray. For exceptional situations, use the mailing-list. The authors and almost all experts are on the mailing-list and will be quick to correct errors. (Everybody is wrong sometimes, even the authors! But you need enough experts in one place to be paying attention, and the only such place is the mailing-list.)

   Another thing to keep in mind is that Lua maintains strict feature symmetry between what's possible in Lua code, and what's possible from the Lua C API. This is important to understand if you want to have a good mental model of the language and why it's designed the way it is. If you're not a C programmer or haven't heavily used the Lua C API, many of Lua's choices may seem arbitrary, especially coming from other languages where their C ABI and FFI interfaces are mostly an afterthought or don't otherwise constrain the in-language semantics. Most "better than Lua" projects are written by people without a sufficient appreciation for this aspect of Lua's design.

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