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Course Outline
Introduction to Lua
- A bit of history
- Lua's goals, features and non-goals
- Resources of Lua documentation and tutorials
- Installing the Lua interpreter
- Setting up and using LuaRocks
Basic syntax and semantics
- Identifiers
- Comments, block comments
- Global variables and enforcing of strictness
- Local variables
- Standalone programs, program arguments
- Compilation units, chunks, expressions, semicolons
Data types and data structures
- Basic types: nil, boolean, number, string
- Object types: function, userdata, thread, table
- References/objects vs. basic values
- The importance of tables in Lua
Introduction to tables and their versatility
- Tables as an associative array
- Tables as numeric arrays, sequences
Basic control structures
- The if then elseif else end
- The while loop
- The repeat loop
- The simple for loop
Error handling
- Return values vs 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 vs stateful iterators
- Differences between iterators and co-routines
Metatables and metamethods
- The set example
- The __tostring metamethod
- Arithmetic metamethods
- The __index, __newindex metamethods
- The __len metamethod
Modules and packages
- Using modules
- Creating modules
- Organizing 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
- Readonly
- Memoization
- Dynamic programming with memoization
- The Fibonacci example
Environments
- 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 change the behavior
- Module initialization and arguments
- Using environments to implement safe modules
Advanced iterators and co-routines
- Producer, consumer, filter
- Wrapping co-routines to get iterators
- Stateless iterator for linked lists
Contributing to the Ecosystem
- Uploading packages to MoonRocks
Functional paradigm in Lua
- The map function
- The reduce / fold function
Object-oriented Programming
- Different approaches to OOP
- Different approaches to inheritance
- Examples
A walkthrough of the Lua Standard Libraries
Compilation
- Compilation
- Eval
- Relationship with the environment
- Binary chunks
Garbage collection
- Weak tables
- Finalizers, the __gc meta-method
Lua bytecode and virtual machine
- Generating bytecode from source code
- Reading and analyzing bytecode
- Quick tour of the source code of the Lua VM
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 vs threads
- Real multi-threading and Lua states
Requirements
Familiarity with at least one other programming language. Programming experience. Optionally if you have familiarity with other scripting languages, that will make it easier to understand Lua.
21 Hours
Testimonials (1)
La clarté des informations. Malgré un programme très compact car très court (2 jours), nous sommes allés des bases jusqu'aux notions les plus poussées du Lua de manière simple.