Where would one start learning to script C with Lua?

silentbicycle · on Oct 16, 2011

The best book for Lua by a longshot is Roberto Ierusalimschy's _Programming in Lua_, second ed. (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/pil2/) It covers the core language and the C API with the same clear, erudite treatment as K&R. (He is one of the core Lua authors.)

Once you get the big ideas, there's a very detailed reference online (http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/), and the mailing list and wiki at http://lua-users.org/ also have a lot of helpful info.

Lua is transitioning from 5.1 to 5.2 right now, which introduces some changes (improvements to the GC, adding to the standard libraries, and improving the package/module system). The main language and C API haven't changed significantly from 5.1; you should be fine if you learn 5.1 now and update later. Lua is small enough that you could add 5.1 to your projects as a library dependency and maintain it yourself, though - it's only about 16,000 lines of code.