1. hello-world - hello world
2. comments
3. factorial - simple resursive function, user input
4. control-structures - if/else, while, for, etc.
5. dofile - run a chunk from another file
6. types - basic types: nil, boolean, string, userdata, function, thread, table. Also integer vs float
7. math - examples from math library
8. strings - examples, along with string library examples
9. tables - lists, records, arrays
10. functions
11. io - Simple I/O, Complete I/O, basic file read/write
12. os - Operating System, os library, to interact with machine, date
13. pattern-matching - strings: finding, replacing, matching
14. binary - pack and unpack data to binary
15. Serialization (skipped)
16. compilation
17. errors - and how to handle them
18. modules - modules, packages, and require
19. iterators - going beyond for loop

1. eight-queen - examples of functions to solve a chess problem
2. word-frequency - find most frequent words in a text

# enter code directly into command line
lua -e 'print("hello world")'
# interactive mode
lua -i

• Tables {} are the main data structure. They can be used as lists, sequences, arrays, etc.
• There is no switch. use elseif instead
• There is a goto. See control-structures
• Functions are first-class values
  • they have the same rights as other types like strings, and can be stored as variables or in tables
• Functions have lexical scoping - can access variables within their enclosing function

• Capitalize to represent the opposite, e.g., %A is all non-letter characters.

Precompiled code is not always smaller, but it loads faster and it serves as a protection against accidental changes

# -o means create a new file
luac -o hello-world.lc hello-world.lua
# precompiled code can run with lua command
lua hello-world.lc

# Add LUA_PATH environmental variable to .bash_profile
export LUA_PATH="~/lua/?.lua;;"
# confirm with printenv LUA_PATH