Beginning Lua Programming
Chapter One
Getting Situated
The first order of business in learning to program in Lua is to acquire and install the necessary
tools. For your initial steps, all you need is the Lua interpreter, a small program that enables you to
type Lua commands and have them executed immediately. As you advance through this book,
you will need additional tools such as a text editor and the Lua compiler.
If you want to write web applications, you'll need access to a web server such as Kepler (a versatile
Lua-based web server) or Apache (an industry-wide standard). These and other web servers
are freely available on the Internet.
If you want to extend Lua with low-level libraries or to embed Lua into your application, you'll
need a software development kit (often referred to as SDK) with a compiler that is compatible with
Lua's application program interface (referred to as API).
Lua is written in the C programming language, and a C compiler turns a program written in this
language into something that can run on your co ... read full excerpt from Beginning Lua Programming ebook
