This manual is the official definition of Lua 5.1. It covers Lua's syntax and semantics, the full API with C, and the standard libraries. Lua is an extension programming language designed to support general procedural programming with data description facilities. It also offers good support for object-oriented programming, functional programming, and data-driven programming. Lua is intended to be used as a powerful, light-weight scripting language for any program that needs one. Lua is implemented as a library, and is highly portable, being written in clean C (that is, in the common subset of...

This collection of articles record some of the existing wisdom and practice on how to program well in Lua. In well-written articles that go much beyond the brief informal exchange of tips in the mailing list or the wiki, the authors share their mastery of all aspects of Lua programming, elementary and advanced. The articles cover a wide spectrum of areas and approaches, with authors from both the industry and academia and titles about game programming, programming techniques, embedding and extending, algorithms and data structures, and design techniques.

Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.