Book recommend-me-do

Are there any decent books out there on game scripting with Lua? (Amazon has a couple but the feedback is hardly stellar). I had a little pop at mixing Lua with Allegro a while back and thought it a potentially dinky way to develop (as one avoids that spaghetti mess where the engine and the game are as one from the off) but I'd really like to read up on the 'proper' way to go about things before revisiting the approach.

Even a decent online article would help -- there seem to be a lot of tutorials covering the basics (ie setting up Lua, calling a script, assigning functions etc) out there, but very few examinations of the roles Lua should adopt and why (I mean, potentially, one could code one's entire game in Lua and only refer back to one's engine for rendering, IO and the like... but is that what goes on? I don't know, but I'd like to).

Game Scripting Mastery is a great book, even if it's more about writing your own scripting language. You'll at least get an idea of how things work, which will do a lot more for understanding how they fit into the big picture.

Cheers Noel.

I can do a Book-Recommend-Me-Don't. I bought Beginning Programming Lua By Kurt Jung and Aaron Brown. Aside from having a front cover of a man with the world's stupidest haircut, it's a poor book with little context for any of what you're learning and with apalling organization, forcing you to jump back and forth through the book reading chapters far out of turn.

EG: Chapter 3 explains something that makes absolutely no sense and then tells you that the information you needed in order to understand it is in chapter 8.

It's not completely useless, but with the free documention at Lua.Org just as useful, if not more so, I can't honestly recommend it.

I see what you mean <g>...



More constructively, I can second Noel's recommendation: I've been finding Game Scripting Mastery helpful for learning about scripting in general (I picked it up a while back, possibly based on his earlier recommendation). It starts off very simple with command-based scripting, then moves into the heavy-duty stuff in an easy-to-follow (and enjoyable) way.