Hi, I’m new to the Codea forum and I actually haven’t even bought the app yet. Before I do, I want to know a few things about Codea. Mainly I want to know if Codea is only a place to code lua or if it is a place to code and a place to learn lua code. I have experience with coding through the app hopscotch, but I do not know lua code, which I was told Codea uses. I figure that if you cannot learn lua code here than I should start somewhere else and learn lua code before I start trying to code on Codea. Any help given will be appreciated!
Thanks,
SmileyPanda
@SmileyPanda If you want someone to hold your hand and write code for you because you want an easy way to learn to program, then don’t bother. If you’re capable of reading and you want to learn Lua/Codea, then Codea will be the start of a great adventure. I never heard of Lua/Codea 4 years ago when I bought Codea. I had experience in coding which you said you also have, and at no time in those 4 years have I regretted buying Codea. Do I want to write some super program to sell on the App Store, no. Do I want to have fun programming, yes. In those 4 years I have learned a lot about Codea, but there is still a lot that I don’t know, and that’s what keeps me interested. You’ll find a lot of help in this forum, but we’re not here to spoon feed you. The more effort you put into learning, the more we will help you. Look at the Wiki link at the top of the forum page and you will find a lot of information to get you started. So to answer your question, there isn’t anything in Codea to teach you. Codea assumes you know how to write code. But like I said, if you’re willing to learn and you try yourself, we are here to help you.
EDIT: As a side note, Lua/Codea is very easy to learn and in no time you’ll be writing code you never thought you could do.
Lua is very simple (as in it has relatively few functions and complications), and is intuitive to read and work in. It doesn’t have any graphics or physics, and that is where Codea comes in, adding in extra libraries. The most difficult part is tables, because they do so many different things, but they are also very exciting to work with.
I learned Lua from scratch after buying Codea, and I knew from day one that I had found the language I’d been looking for, for many years. I’d tried Objective-C but found it was enormously complicated.
So don’t worry about Lua. You can learn it inside Codea.
Codea itself is a fabulous graphics sandbox, helping you learn 2D and 3D graphics programming, game physics, animation, etc. I haven’t ever had so much fun programming.
I’ve written a couple of ebooks based on my own learning experience, here. You might be interested in the Lua and Codea books.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mr2yzp07vffskxt/AACqVnmzpAKOkNDWENPmN4psa
PS I have absolutely no connection to the developers. This is my honest opinion.