Programming in Lua (4th Edition)

This book is the Chinese translation of the 4th edition of Programming in Lua, written by Roberto Ierusalimschy, the chief architect of the Lua language, and is the official authoritative tutorial on Lua. The 4th edition targets Lua 5.3 (the latest version of the language at the time of writing) and reorganizes the book into four parts. Part 1, "The Language," begins with chunks, lexical conventions, global variables, types and values, then introduces numbers, strings, tables, functions, input/output and control structures. Part 2, "Real Programming," covers closures, pattern matching, dates and times, bitwise operations, data structures, data files and serialization, compilation, execution and errors, and modules and packages, using interlude case studies to apply language elements to real problems. Part 3, "The Language Itself," delves into iterators and the generic for, metatables and metamethods, object-oriented programming, environments, garbage collection, coroutines and reflection. Part 4, "The C API," systematically explains how Lua interacts with C, including extending applications, calling C from Lua, techniques for writing C functions, user-defined types, resource management, and threads and states. The book also details new features introduced in Lua 5.3, such as integers and bitwise operations, and includes exercises in each chapter so that readers, beyond mastering usage, can appreciate the trade-offs in the design and implementation of a scripting language.