Good ways to competently learn a programming language?

[hobbledehoy899]

I'm primarily trying to learn Lua for use with the Love2D framework and would like some advice on how to actually learn to do stuff with it and (at least partially) memorize knowledge about the language.

Thanks in advance.​

 

[Issac]

The boring answer: practice practice practice.
Follow tutorials and practice. I know nothing about Lua, but it's true for any programming language.
Once you've followed a few tutorials and get a feel of it, try to make small tasks for yourself to solve.
Always start by writing what you want to do, then more in detail what you need to do that thing. Then look up what programming stuff you need for each part. Then try putting it together.

 

[hobbledehoy899]

The boring answer: practice practice practice.
Follow tutorials and practice. I know nothing about Lua, but it's true for any programming language.
Once you've followed a few tutorials and get a feel of it, try to make small tasks for yourself to solve.
Always start by writing what you want to do, then more in detail what you need to do that thing. Then look up what programming stuff you need for each part. Then try putting it together.

Yeah, that's what I've been doing with HTML.

 

[FAST6191]

Find something interesting to do with it. Don't know what it might be for you but most people can learn if they have an interest beyond a vague desire and appreciation for the fact that it would be really useful to know how to code.

Games are good for this. https://sgimenez.github.io/laby/ is my usual suggestion but in a similar thread the other week had https://codecombat.com/ linked up which is very nice looking.

If you really want to get into games then many emulators support lua in such a way that you can alter games in substantial ways. fceux for the NES is the main reference for most http://www.fceux.com/web/help/fceux.html?LuaScripting.html but it is on every system up to and including desmume for the DS http://wiki.desmume.org/index.php?title=Faq#What_is_this_Lua_stuff_I_see.3F . Tool assisted speedrun folks are where you want to look for that as not all the biggest emulators for a given system will sport it out of the box.
In any case it might take you further into ROM hacking than you might care to go for this but on the other hand if you wanted to learn some ROM hacking, or at least the game's internal logic bothering side of it rather than the text and graphics stuff most tutorials start with and focus primarily upon then it could get you somewhere in that.

and a choice thing that should be rewritten for most languages as it applies everywhere
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/shz02d41.aspx