• How long does it take to learn lua?
    3 replies, posted
How long did it take you to get fluent in lua? And how did you learn it and what's the current best way to learn it you'd say?
Fluent in LUA would be around a few months. (it's very simple once you understand the basics). Fluent in Garry's Mod scripting? ehhh a few years. The only reason it takes longer with Garry's Mod is, to remember all of these functions it is a pain, Garry's Mod You're goal isn't to be 'fluent', it should be to reach a stage of 'understanding', where you can look at something and depict whats wrong or how it works. You can always use programs like Visual Studio and C++ and get a GLua helper, like I do. Easy way to search up functions, hooks, tables without even having to research. But anyway, scripting isn't hard, LUA isn't hard, you just need to be strong minded, optimistic and most importantly willing to continue, as you can't learn if you give up easily.
Lua may be one of the easier languages out there (even in the world of scripting it's quite simple to pick up compared to others). But this is like asking "how long will it take me to fly to Mars?". It depends; what's your work ethic like? Are you doing it out of genuine interest in learning it or are you just doing it on a whim? How good is your logical thought process? Are you good at abstracting things? If this is your first language, expect hurdles. Expect it to feel like you've made no progress. It took me years to really wrap my head around programming to the point that I can somewhat comfortably jump between languages. The first step is always the hardest here. If you persist enough, eventually it tends to all just click together and you'll wonder how you ever struggled to understand basic concepts. In terms of resources for learning it, the GMod wiki did have some okay beginner tutorials when I last looked. But there's probably a whole host of semi-decent alternatives out there now. Google is your friend, but knowing exactly what to Google is more important. And you can always ask here, even if there are assholes around here, somebody is usually willing to help (in fact, it's the only reason I rarely post here, to answer questions others just aren't. Once a year ) Realistically to learn the language you just need to understand the basic constructs of its logical operators, how it defines functions, and what data types/ structures it has. Any site can teach you that, some better than others. To learn Lua and be able to apply it to GMod will require some diving into the wiki to see how it all meshes together. I learned it initially by learning how to make a HUD replacement for GMod, but that's because that's what drove me at the time. Find an idea that really interests you, don't make it too extravagant, and work out how to deconstruct it to logical components that you could actually code. Having a goal is probably the most important part of learning to code. For me it was my HUD when learning Lua, and my degree when learning Java/C#/F#/C++. For you? Well that's up to you!
whoever answers you to this specific question will be wrong. Every person learns differently. A few learn by simply watching youtube tutorials and doing the same and then trying out their own stuff (that would be me) others read the programming language documentation, others read text based tutorials. others come to facepunch and ask every single basic thing here that they could find out with a simple google search
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