Since the wiki may be too hard for new beginners, what are some YouTubers you would recommend for new programmers?
YouTube doesn’t have everything you’re looking for, which is a problem. Best bet is to either deal with it and read the developer wiki, or to search for your solution on the DevForum or other third party websites.
2 Likes
Yes that could be a solution but wiki can be really confusing especially for players who arent familiar with Lua.
1 Like
The wiki has a ton of great articles that you can read here. It’s also very simple to look up whatever you need as it has a search function.
I extremely recommend the wiki as it has so much content that can be used compared to YouTubers who may not always have the content that your looking for. It’s not very hard to type out a search query to find what your looking for.
Personally, I started off with AlvinBlox tutorials, and they helped me get a grasp on Roblox scripting at first. My only caution with YT videos is to make sure they’re up to date, as some could contain deprecated code (aka code that’s not for use anymore)
As @DesiredFlamingFire mentioned:
Often times, if you’re looking for something specific, you might wanna try to search it up on Google. On my past experiences, posts on the DevForums and Scripting Helpers have some detailed answers to some inquiries.
However, the Roblox Dev Wiki is the safest bet in finding what you need if all else doesn’t work. While it may be confusing at first, try to read between the lines and attempt to understand the code. Of course, if you still need clarification, just post an inquiry in this category!
2 Likes
My Suggestions:
Sorry for the long reply, but scripting is a very complicated topic and I made this informative so you can have a good understanding
Personally, I think you are going about it all wrong. YouTube is an incredible guide to so many things, but it only seems to help if you use it correctly as a resource. For many topics, I believe YouTube can be used to learn from scratch but for learning LUA I believe you should take other steps.
- Don’t just focus on YouTube. Before DevHub, when there was only ROBLOX Wiki, ROBLOX Wiki mostly only had descriptions and short examples of programming concepts in ROBLOX Lua. But when ROBLOX DevHub was introduced (Wiki’s replacement), not only did it offer what the previous wiki had, but also a more in-depth introduction guide to programming, building, and almost everything related to game development on ROBLOX. This is a great resource to learn. And everything you learn there will be up to date methods, and most of the time the code will be refined to its most efficient possibility. (Something not garunteed with YouTube videos)
- I am not saying don’t use YouTube at all, its good to learn basic concepts as well. Try AlvinBlox. I am aware there are so many other youtubers, but I’ve noticed out of many of them, AlvinBlox videos are the most simplest in steps and instruction, cleanest, most informative, and most friendly to beginners.
If you want to learn scriptings, here the steps I suggest you learn it in:
- First, learning basic programming concepts. Do not begin by specifically only focusing on the syntax for Roblox Lua. (Syntax is basically like how you write the code in specific spelling, words, capitalization, etc.) The reason I say this is because programming concepts are universal. All programming languages will have programming concepts like if statements, functions, variables, loops, etc. But each language will have different ways of writing these concepts and using them. This would be the difference in syntax.
- Once you understand basic programming concepts, then move onto better understanding how to write in Roblox Lua in specific. It is important to have a basic understanding of the ROBLOX Lua syntax before working on stuff.
- Once you learn the basic programming concepts and syntax (depending on how much experience you already have, and how quickly you learn this can be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks I am guessing), I’d recommend start working on specific projects. Obviously, don’t try and go to big or complicated, but enough to put your new skills into a real world situation.
From there, you should have enough experience in scripting to continue to learn and advance your skills. Hope this helped! Tried to make it helpful to a beginner.
19 Likes
I agree, you should learn basic programming concepts in a general sense, and learn basic debugging and logical problem solving techniques first. The foundation will speed up your learning in general.
- Highly recommend looking up tables for lua.
Then do the tutorials and the latest creator challenge was nice, but there was a few errors when I did it, not sure if they are still there. ( you can do this without the first step )
- This is where i would look for youtube videos. Kinda medium knowledge where you can follow and understand the coding without hand holding. After basic knowledge an following the Roblox tuts.
Then
Scan the DevForum for what others are trying to figure out on scripting support and try to solve it. A lot of them you will need to skip because they don’t make sense at the time or are too circumstantial.
However many provide a clear goal, starting point and methods for achieving the solution, you just have to research API, ponder and test.
- This will slowly push you to learn things beyond your current scope of knowledge and keep you relatively up to date on updates.
1 Like
I think wiki or forums are beter, this forum is also good but you mmust be new member (ok you are if you can post it xD) to ask on something (big problem for me bcause i didnt use this forum and now i must ask on something so i rushed new member in 2 days xD), so there arent so many questions like on stack overflow
pighead10 used to do Roblox Lua tutorials. Unfortunately, the tutorials might be outdated(8 years old) and there might be deprecated API.
I used to read the wiki for each API and memorize their usage. I also check the scripts and solutions around the forum for the idea of what API(s) should be used.
Practice did the rest of the learning which is probably over 66% of the time. I eventually learned on how to use ModuleScript(s).
I believe most tutorials can be found in #development-resources:community-tutorials, if you need any help. Look around there. Otherwise try searching for #development-support:scripting-support.
Sometimes I go to stack overflow just to learn C++ or other programming languages. Lua is included.
Oh, I completely forgot about the debugging part. I 100% agree, debugging and learning basic problem solving is absolutely essential to programming. This requires a proper understanding of the syntax and Roblox API. A lot of problems will only be syntax errors, and as your code becomes more complicated that’s when you will be banging your head on the table, yelling at everyone else in your house to get you more coffee and then take a second to cry. (But of course, if you spend a lot of time and effort to properly code and think through your code the first time around, you will obviously have fewer errors.)
Don’t let this scare you, as you advance you will be more comfortable
A Little Story:
Last year in my computer science class, the general curriculum had projects one after the other, each introducing a new programming concept. (Tbh, I don’t know why they did this, in the least disrespectful way possible, if I was a high school computer science teacher I’d never jump in so quickly and confuse so many students) Each project, the teacher already had the code printed out from the first experiment (once again, I didn’t like this because I’d think it’d much better to students if the teachers themselves figured it out on the spot challenging students to pitch in and help out) But anyway, the teacher would just spit out the code and the students would type it, explaining the code as the teacher was writing it. But not even one time in the entire year of the course did the teacher teach anything about debugging. She only thought us the right way of doing it expecting us not to make mistakes and to do the project in perfect steps. (Anyone who programs would most likely agree this is not the proper way to approach programming at all…) But naturally, this didn’t happen. Students made errors, syntax errors was the most common, and sometimes they made errors other then syntax errors but had no understanding of what debugging even was and what they were even writing, (they were just copying their teacher) so they could not debug anything. Every time they needed the teachers to help.
Anyway, sorry for the story but I thought it was only right to properly emphasize how important debugging is. I am sorry I forgot to mention it.
Peaspod scripting tutorials were live i remember watching them they actually helped me a lot lol
i have a feeling his tutorials might be a little outdated tho
2 Likes
I started out by watching Peaspod but just watching YouTube videos wouldn’t suffice. After YouTube, I recommend creating games by using the wiki to simultaneously get a better understanding of Lua and also game development.
1 Like
Be cautious when watching YouTube videos for this thing. I find that very often, the content is either outdated or teaches just straight up bad code. I didn’t really watch many videos when starting out so I’m not really able to recommend anyone, but if you do proceed to learn material from videos you should definitely watch out.
After peaspod i just started to apply what i learned, i never really used wiki to learn but i did use wiki to find out functions and properties of some objects