My new LuaU learning book

Hello all!

I made a learning book for people who are new to programming in Roblox Studio.
So as a scripter myself I wanted to make a book that teaches you how to use Roblox itself and it’s engine.

I am a scripter for many years and I wanted to try something new and teach others on how to make your own game.

For now I have a super short ‘book’
I will make it free because this is still in progress and will post more about what I added to it.
The book handles the main fundementals of Roblox Studio
Examples are

  • Building
  • Scripting (Will depend heavily on this one)
  • GUI design
  • and others

I am very excited to work on this projects and I hope you guys will have as much fun learning as I did.

This is the first ever version of the book :wink:
LuaU book.pdf (4.3 MB)

Please do not expect a master piece, I am very bad at designing! :rofl:

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And yes, I would appreciate feedback!

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Had a good read of the book and I can confidently say that it is a great start. The structure is there - You explained the context behind game development like programming languages and game engines, and you’ve covered the basic use of Roblox Studio. Your text is also divided into short, digestible paragraphs to not overwhelm the reader.

Improvements

It would benefit you if you got a bit more in-depth into the explanations and key words, though. For instance, your definition of a programming language is too abstract. You could’ve explained that every game/website/app is made with them, and that Roblox uses LUA.

One more example is how you define a game engine, which you only called an “engine”.

An engine is a type of machine (app) that is capable of making games, these engines use
different techniques of implementing a game and making it playable.

I would write

A game engine is an application/software which facilitates the development of games. These software tend to have a renderer, where you can see a preview of the game, as well as script editors, where the code for the game is written.

This software grants developers the tools needed to make high-functioning games, and often supports multiple programming languages. In this case, Roblox Studio uses LUA (often referred to as LUAU in Roblox use), which is an easy to learn programming language…

While the order and flow of the document is well-written, you should also consider the order of keywords and when to define them. For example, you introduced scripts before getting into Roblox Studio itself, which can be quite confusing.

Other than that, you can work on the formatting of the document. You provided images in the right places which was extremely helpful.

Hope this helps.

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Thanks a lot for the suggested improvements !
There is still a lot to fix here and there.
I will try to resolve the issues you adressed!

Thanks for taking your time to write this!

2 Likes

I feel like this is a really good book for beginners, if not for 1 thing:
1The images are way too big.
I get the saying “An image is more than a thousand words” but I feel like there needs to be more text that explains stuff. Maybe make it so that the image is on 1 side and the text on the other side, kinda like how newspapers do it. Also, because with smaller images, you can fit more images and text in and prevents you from having one of those

ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE BOOKS.

Also, some advice on how to structure the book:
Introduce some basic concepts about Studio, and then you can make slightly more technical concepts, gradually working your way up to more technical concepts. That’s how I learned scripting, bit it can also apply to practically every part of Roblox Studio.

Haha yes as I said I’m very like crazy bad at designing I try to do my best but for now the looks arent the most important because I’m still setting kinda up, thanks for taking the time for reading and writing feedback!

Yeah, overall really good book. 9/10
Just make the images smaller, so if you decide to print the book in mass it won’t be like a million pages long. That’s really the only criticism I have.

It’s here!
My new edition of the book.
VERSION 1.1

LuaU book.pdf (4.7 MB)

In this update I added some scripting knowledge and a fun experiment for beginners to try!

So, I’ve come and made a (very basic) prototype to give an idea of what I think would be the best front for the book, without the text and stuff. Ik this will obv be changed, but still

I recommend using the proper capitalization: Luau (it’s not an acronym)

I wouldn’t really consider this as a LuaU book since most of it here currently doesn’t contain about scripting much but overall it’s not that bad, just needs more info that goes in depth

Yes it will its not a pure informational book but a learning one so you basically start from 0. In this case I began with placing parts then I went to explain different variable types after that I showed math and other stuff with the variables. (At the most basic concept) Then I made an experiment (a long task) where you apply previous lessons and learn small bits of new scripting. Later on I will go deeper into scripting and write about

  • Different Script Types
    (LS, SS, Modules)
  • Other Places in Roblox Studio
  • Advanced mathematical methods (calculating a linear speed for example for a gun)
  • Loops (specifically for i loops, while loops, recursion)
  • Functions
  • GUI main fundamentals
  • Databases (Ordered, and not ordered ones)
  • Connecting with other programming languages via localhosts (not sure about this one yet), examples are AI with python that’s connected to a Lua Script in Roblox. (AI is mostly premade GPT-2 or GPT-3 (if bought))
  • Connecting to 3rd party Databases

And I think this is just a few

Yeah youre right Ive never paid attention to that I am going to fair

That’s so cool I like it already!