User talk:JulienDethurens/Guide

Wiki Tutorial Outline

Instead of everyone writing their own guides and tutorials on pretty much the same exact concepts, I'd like there be one single structure of tutorials that everyone contributes to. I think that's what everyone is searching for, really.

I've written an outline for what I think a lua tutorial should be on the wiki. It's basically a proper implementation of the Lua Help page. What this page does right is define a structure of tutorials, ordered from most simple to most difficult. What's wrong with it is that the structure isn't well thought out, and the articles it contains don't have inter-navigation with each other. That is, there are no previous and next buttons.

This outline describes the structure and order of these articles. They're ordered based on abstraction; later articles can assume that the reader has read concepts described in previous articles. Simplicity is also taken into consideration, even if that means skipping over something and coming to it later. Ideally, a beginner should be able to traverse the articles in order, understanding everything in each article, without jumping around pages too much.

Here's the outline so far:

Outline:

Map: Scripting Help Creating Scripts - Script Instance - Lua IDEs Pure Lua - Starter First Script - print - comments Variables - Assignment - Multiple assignment - local - Naming Data Types - Numbers - Strings - Booleans - Nil Expressions Operators - Arithmetic - Relational - Logical Statements Chunks and Blocks - More on local Conditional Statements - if - elseif - else Loops - Numeric For - While-Do - Repeat-Until - Break Functions - Arguments - Returning - multiple returns; relation to variables Tables - Construction - Indexing - Arrays - Dictionaries - Setting Indices Standard Libraries - string - math - table - Intermediate String Patterns More on Tables - keys: any type Generic For Operator Precedence Conditional assignment - Advanced Metatables Environments Coroutines goto (5.2) Lua and the Roblox API - Instances - Properties - Methods - Events - Callbacks - Roblox Data Types

Once again, the order isn't concrete. I'm thinking of introducing instances earlier on, such as teaching properties right after variables, and methods after functions. Who knows. Need to think about it some more. --Anaminus 01:38, 30 April 2012 (EDT)

Heh, your order is extremly similar to how I'm planning to order stuff for this tutorial. Pure Lua first, then add the ROBLOX API to it all. I teach about the print function and the comments first, then variables, some basic terminology and understanding and some other things.

I know there are already tutorials I could contribute to instead of writing my own, but I just don't want to contribute to them: most of them are a mess. That's why I'm writing my own from scratch, so we have a good tutorial that we can start from. The problem: every writer wants to write his own tutorial from scratch for the same reason, but none of them actually finishes it. So far, my tutorial is advancing. User:Crazypotato4/Test's tutorial is nice too. Finally, we have Camoy's Cookbook, which is full of examples that we can link to, since they're explained there. --JulienDethurens 01:47, 30 April 2012 (EDT)