  Lua Fundamentals培訓(xùn)

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
Object-oriented programming
The building blocks of OOP in Lua
Examples
Discussion on more advanced language features
Weak tables
Finalizers
Compilation, eval, loading