Opinions on learning to script from book

Hello, I want to learn how to code Lua. However I am horrible at learning from videos. There is a book I saw recommended by a YouTuber. They said that it was really helpful, the book name is “The Advanced Roblox Coding Book An Unofficial Guide” I would like to know the opinions of others before I buy, and start learning from this book. Also any other tips for scripting would be greatly appreciated.

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I started scripting by watching people such as Alvinblox code, and I watched every second of it and he explained what it would do. So I watched more of his videos, and I started to learn how it would work and what it would do.

Buying a book about lua may be fine though.

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I learned how to script by modifying other people code, at the start a few properties/variables, then whole sections and afterwards entire logic etc. If you’re more of a practical person than a copy/write down person this method may be more ideal.

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It seems a lot of people learn differently, I might just have to try it out and see how it goes.

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First of all I haven’t read this or any other book so my opinion may be biased. I don’t think books are helpful at all, learning programming (at least from my experience and people who I’ve helped learn) should be practical, yes you might need books later on to grasp some specific concepts, for example vectors. I don’t think a generalised book will help you at all, and even if it will it will greatly slow you down, because there is simply too much to fit into a single book.

If you can’t learn from videos I suggest reading lua documentation, this is kind of tedious but should be better than reading an actual book. If you want I can link you which chapters you could start with. You can then move on to Roblox documentation. Also if you find anything confusing in the docs (it happens often), you can either look up that specific thing, or even ask an AI tool to explain it to you, such as ChatGPT.

I hope this was helpful, let me know if you have any more questions. I wish you great success in learning!

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Thank you very much for your advice! I will definitely try Roblox Documentation!

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I have read that book online with kindle unlimited and I don’t think it’s worth it. It shares many intermediate concepts that are easily accessible by watching Youtube or reading DevForum posts.

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the issue with books is they get out of date. I recommend “TheDevKing” on YouTube, he has some nice playlists that go over things super well. I struggled learning off alvinblox, documentation, etc but he got me past the first hurdle and from there I could figure it out on my own.

Your goal shouldn’t be to become a master at coding off tutorials. Learn the basics, then learn how to phrase your questions well. Once you are competent enough to be able to name what you need and look it up you can find basically anything on the devforum, the official docs, or more recently even chatGPT if it’s a basic question.

Once you can read errors and understand the logic behind scripting you know how to script :+1:

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We have a copy of the same book and it is really good. Thoroughly recommend it.
I also found the official Roblox education stuff to be really useful guiding you through building different game types from start to finish. I work best from written examples too and find their stuff well written.

tbh I find the Alvin YT stuff is overly simplified and doesn’t teach

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The only negative aspect of using ChatGPT together with Roblox code is that it has a small tendency to spit out deprecated code(for example wait instead of task.wait). However that can also happen with a book unless it has been published really recently.

This is related to the fact that Roblox code is very dynamic and they still push out updates way too often. Maybe that’s why many people chose to learn by doing when it comes to this platform. Also in comparison to other languages we don’t have to deal with actual objectively hard things like interfering with memory, pointers etc.

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Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for your response!

I will try to work my way there, thank you.

Thank you for your opinion on this!