Lua Programming Gems is a collection of articles on Lua in the spirit of all the other “gems” books that came before it. This is simply a must have for all Lua programmers and touches on pretty much every aspect of Lua in some way.

I’m still relatively new to Lua myself so some of the samples are beyond my Lua skill level. Even so, I think the book will be a valuable reference later on when my skills have advanced.

The one important lesson I took away from this book is that Lua really is a language for building languages. Luas only data structure is the table from which you can build all your traditional structures like queues and lists but that doesn’t mean that you should. Instead, try to use Lua as it is and adapt to the way Lua does things instead of forcing Lua to be something else.