Customer Reviews

Lua Programming Gems

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I recently got this book and read through it. Seeing there are no reviews here yet, I figured I better write one to give some an idea of what this book is about.

Note I'm no beginner to Lua.
Over the last five years I have written thousands of lines of Lua and have done pretty advanced interfacing to the Lua C API (for custom modules), added LuaJIT and other customizations, etc.
I really like the language; it's clean and simple, yet very versatile in it's details.

First, the book wasn't quite what I had expected.
I was hoping it was full of little tricks and techniques of that I didn't already know.
Although it's not in fact "Lua Snippets", it's "Lua programming Gems" after all..

A lot of it are what appears to be more of a case study for particular uses.
Where the authors after having worked out some particular large or difficult problem wrote up sort of a post mortem on what worked for them; on how they solved it et al.
Examples, there are articles on Lua for Game Programing, Lua versions of "Common Data structures" (STL C++ and C# types et al), and oddly even a Forth programming language in Lua, etc.
A lot of which I found a bit abstract in context that was a lot about the problem and perhaps less of Lua as a language.
Although all of which are great if something your looking for fits into one or more of these categories.
You might find a solution to your problem and have it worth the price of book many times over.

My favorite article is the one of the less abstract called "Lua Performance Tips" which you can read officially online free here:
[...]

In the end I'd say if you haven't read "Programming in Lua, Second Edition" or "Beginning Lua Programming (Programmer to Programmer)" yet (both here on Amazon) then read one or both of those first.
Then if you are an immediate Lua user, and, or, one or more of the Gems fit your needs (they should post the TOC here) then get this book too.

A plus is the book is edited by the Lua language authors them self's: Roberto Ierusalimschy (and the author of the "Lua Performance Tips" Gem in the book), Waldemar Celes, and Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo!