[strenholme]

Shameless plug time: I have written a public domain book which looks at using Lua (Lua 5.1 but the code works in newer versions as well as Lua 5.1/Luau/LuaJIT) as a text parsing engine. The book assumes familiarity with other common *NIX scripting languages (such as AWK, Perl, or Python) and goes over in detail the pain points for people coming from a *NIX scripting background:

https://maradns.samiam.org/lunacy/SamDiscussesLunacy.pdf

Source files (.odt file, fonts used by book):

https://github.com/samboy/lunacy/tree/master/doc

Hope this helps!

[azemetre]

Thanks for recommendation and writing the book! I'm reading the introduction, it doesn't answer why you chose to fork lua and create lunacy. What were you trying to solve with lunacy that lua couldn't do?

The TOC looks great, I will read this soon. Need to finish "Debugging CSS" first (another good book IMO).

[strenholme]

The main reason I made Lunacy was to have a standard compile of Lua 5.1, since it’s possible to make a Lua 5.1 compile with, say 32-bit floats or which only supports integers but not floats.

Lunacy also has a few built in libraries which are not included with Lua 5.1, such as binary bitwise operations (and/or/xor). It also fixes some security issues with Lua 5.1 (better random number generator, hash compression algorithm which is protected from hash flooding attacks).

In addition, I have made a tiny Windows32 binary of Lunacy.

Don’t worry about the Lunacy changes; all of the examples in the book work with bog standard Lua 5.1 with a bit32 library (bit32 is common enough most OSes with a Lua 5.1 package also have a bit32 package for Lua 5.1).