1. Posted by Centry on Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:58:51

    Hey James, Bryan, and Matt(which is my name too).  I love all the effort and examples you put in the book to clerify a lot of things, but a few questions are growing in my head about my progress (im currently in Advanced Functions) and it's that will I have to know ALL of the information given previously and in future chapters to make addons?  And when do I get to actually make addons? And if skipping information (out of not really understanding much) will make a huge difference in understanding how to make addons.  Or if i skip to the "Programming in WoW," can i just look back to previous chapters if I need to clerify anything.

    I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who thinks learning a programming language (especially my first) is a real pain to get used to.

  2. Posted by jnwhiteh on Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:58:51

    Hey James, Bryan, and Matt(which is my name too).  I love all the effort and examples you put in the book to clerify a lot of things, but a few questions are growing in my head about my progress (im currently in Advanced Functions) and it's that will I have to know ALL of the information given previously and in future chapters to make addons?  And when do I get to actually make addons? And if skipping information (out of not really understanding much) will make a huge difference in understanding how to make addons.  Or if i skip to the "Programming in WoW," can i just look back to previous chapters if I need to clerify anything.

    I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who thinks learning a programming language (especially my first) is a real pain to get used to.

    The book is written in this specific way because it is the best way to learn how to write addons.  It really is quite important to understand how to use Lua and XML when you go to work on addons simply because writing addons really is programming and you need to understand the programming language in order to work effectively.  As you can see from the table of contents you will create your first addon in Chapter 12.  You are welcome to skip whatever you want, but the book is written to fully prepare you for the upcoming chapters.  You may be able to follow the simple directions provided in the chapters but without understanding how or why it works how much is that worth to you?

    In short, this is a self study program, and you can do whatever you'd like but I would highly recommend working through the chapters successively (Chapter 6 can be skipped entirely as explained in the Introduction and the beginning of that chapter, since it it is just a reference of the Lua standard libraries).

    Trying to write addons without understanding Lua is going to be extremely difficult, especially if you have never programmer before.  You don't have to have everythign memorized (that's why this book is a reference) but you really should move through the basics and work your way up.

    I would also suggest checking the table of contents, considering you're almost done with the "Lua" portion of the book and are moving onto the "XML" and "Anatomy of an Addon" chapters which lead directly into creating your first addon.

    Hope that helps.