Home Page - World of Warcraft Programming: A Guide and Reference for Creating WoW Addons

Chapter 2 - Exploring Lua Basics

Using the Lua Interpreter 9
- Running Commands - 10
- Understanding Error Messages - 10
- Using History to Make Changes - 11
- Quitting the Interpreter - 11
  - Microsoft Windows - 11
  - Mac OS X - 11
Working with Numbers - 12
- Basic Arithmetic Operations - 12
- Scientific Notation - 13
- Hexadecimal Notation - 14
- Understanding Floating Point - 14
Understanding Values and Variables - 15
- Exploring Values and Their Types - 15
  - Primitive Types - 15
  - Using the type() Function - 16
- Using Variables - 16
  - Valid Variable Names - 17
  - Assigning Variables - 17
  - Assigning Multiple Variables - 18
  - Comparing Values - 18
Working with Strings - 19
- Comparing Strings - 19
- Concatenating Multiple Strings - 20
- Converting Numbers to Strings - 20
- Converting Strings to Numbers - 21
- Quoting Strings - 21
  - Single Quote (') - 21
  - Double Quote (") - 22
  - Bracket Quote ([[ ]]) - 22
- Escaping Special Characters - 23
- Getting a String’s Length - 24
Boolean Values and Operators - 25
- Using the and Operator - 25
- Using the or Operator - 26
- Negation Using the not Operator - 26
- Understanding the nil Value - 27
Exploring Scope - 27
- Blocks - 27
- Chunks - 28
Summary - 29