LUA: really for Beginners
The translation of the german tutorial into an english version has been done of a good friend of mine.
If you are of a different native language, it would be a good exercise for you to make an according translation as well. And I would be glad to have one more foreign language on this website.
Preface (only a short one)
With this tutorial I would not only like to introduce the programming language LUA, but also programming itself. The only thing you should know is mathematics and english. Nothing else will be necessary to be able to learn LUA with help of this tutorial.
I appreciate any suggestions and hints if failures have been found. If you find misspellings...you can keep them. ;)
Another advice: every hour you spend on this tutorial to learn LUA will save you a lot of trouble in programming your script later on. I try to repeat all things, that already have been explained, when it will be used in other chapters again. However, it is important that you repeat all the things by yourself as well. This is part of learning. I guess you know this already. ;)
It does not matter if the game, where you intend to use LUA, supports not all of the functions you will learn at this tutorial. It will run in a sandbox [1] then. I also try to disclose all tricks of programming that I know. However, for this you have to go through all the chapters in this tutorial. Some games do not allow all of this you will learn because they use LUA only as supporting programming language. If there are any functions missing in the sandbox later on....it does not matter at all.
[1] Sandbox is used in information technology as runtime environment feature of a software. The software will be protected from the remaining part of the system, like putting something into the sandbox. Therefor, the software can not damage anything and on the other side, the effect of the software can be recorded. Different techniques will be used for this, from changing file systems up to a complete simulation of a computer.