Lua Quick Reference is a new book on Lua that is now available for pre-order at https://foicica.com/lua. It is slated for publication in early July, 2017. The linked website includes an excerpt from the book and has some additional information. For convenience, the book's description is reproduced below.

Lua is a small, fast, powerful, and embeddable scripting language. It is well-suited for use in video games, application scripting, embedded devices, and nearly anywhere else a scripting language is needed. This quick reference contains a wealth of knowledge on how to program and embed Lua, whether it is Lua 5.3, 5.2, or 5.1. It groups the language's features and C API in a convenient and easy-to-use manner, while clearly marking the differences between Lua versions.

This book covers:

• Lua syntax, expressions, and statements
• Metatables and metamethods
• Object-oriented programming with Lua
• Creating and working with Lua and C Modules
• Lua's standard library and its C API
• Collaborative multi-threading in Lua and C
• How to embed and use Lua within a host
• And much more

LuaRocks was selected by Google to be one of the participating organizations in Google Summer of Code 2017!

Google Summer of Code is an international annual program, in which Google awards stipends to students who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer. The program is open to university students aged 18 or over. The coding period goes from May 30 to August 29 (that is, the summer break in the Northern Hemisphere).

LuaRocks, the package manager for Lua, has been part of GSoC in the past as part of the LabLua organization (a research lab at PUC-Rio, the home of Lua). But this was the first time we applied as an independent organization, and we are very happy and thankful to be accepted.

Our global team of mentors (with people hailing from four continents!) has produced a nice list of project ideas, but students are free and encouraged to contact us with ideas of their own as well!

Applying to the program

If you are an eligible student and wish to apply, you should join the luarocks-developers mailing list and say hi at our Gitter group.

Once you find a project you are interested in, you should contact the mentor for that project by email, and this questionnaire. If your application looks appropriate, the mentor may ask you to perform some small task related to the project to assess your abilities, and discuss with you how to best present your proposal. Proposals accepted from March 20 to April 3, 2017!

Join us and come hack LuaRocks this next summer! (...or winter if you're in the Southern Hemisphere! :) )

Meet-ups and conferences!

Next

• March 5th 2017 - Lua/LuaJIT conference, Moscow

  • Annnouncement

• June 3rd 2017 - LuaConf, Rio de Janeiro

  • Website
  • Call for presentations
  • Call for sponsor

Past

• February 4-5th 2017 - Lua Devroom @ FOSDEM 2017, Brussels

  • Slides and videos
  • Video of panel: The Future of Small Languages
  • Pictures

• October 13-14th 2016 - Lua Workshop, California

  • Slides and videos

• July 9th 2016 - Lua Conf, Rio de Janeiro

  • Videos

News

• Feb 7th - Lua community events & developer relations effort
• Jan 30th - Lua 5.3.4 now available
• Jan 13th - New Lua IRC channel in French

Featured Releases

• Feb 6th - LuaWt 0.0.1 (GPL-2.0)
• Jan 30th - Ravi 0.19 (MIT / GPL)
• Jan 24th - SmithSNMP 0.8 (GPL-2.0)
• Jan 22nd - Lyaml 6.1 (MIT)
• Jan 13th - LPeg 1.0.1 (MIT)
• Jan 13th - opeth (MIT)
• Jan 5th - see.lua (MIT)

Resources

• Oxford Machine Learning lectures