Scott,
thanks a lot for your reply. Let me try to clarify some things here. My blog is just sharing my experiences trying to learn Lua and Corona at the same time. I am not a professional developer and I think this is a good start to people like me, trying to figure out how easy is to create apps for iPhone using Ansca SDK.
When I mentioned Corona documentation is far from well documented, I was clearly comparing with documentation provided by Apple or event the PHP.org website, for example. Of course there is good content in Corona’s sample but, again in the view of a non-Lua developer, the documents could have much more info and examples.
Sure a search on the web will bring Lua results but, have you compared this against other languages? For your info, I learned PHP, Dreamweaver and Google Maps/Javascript in less than a month (trial time of Dreamweaver) just using a book and the web examples to build a pretty complex site (www.ppgplaces.com). Why was I successful? Because the amount of examples available and an amazing book with samples. Lua/Corona are not there yet. This is a fact.
About the blue book on Lua. This was the first thing I bought and read. The book (mine is 2nd edition) can be used as a reference for sure (although some of the sample codes are different in the live site) but it is not enough to help a beginner to create complex applications (and besides I think the language used was confuse - but this is just a personal opinion).
Thanks to people like you, I am getting more knowledge and confidence using the language. The dofile limitation, for example, was mentioned because it is available in the book as sample, but didn’t run in Corona. Again, as a beginner, I would love to have this mentioned in Corona’s documentation (like a table with non-applicable functions).
I am evaluating Appcelerator too (and maybe it should be a best bet here). My decision in to start with Corona was based on a hybrid app that I am planning to develop. It will need good graphics tools but also “forms” like feature. Also, Corona seems to be easier to code for me, considering my experience as Lingo developer. Agree with you that Appcelerator documentation are much worse than Corona but, their KitchenSink and Snapost apps are a good way to learn to code. I would love to have something like KitchenSink from Ansca.
I understand the huge challenge of write a SDK but you have to admit that Ansca could be more clear in some answers. There are several postings here where their team mentions that request/feature A or B will be implemented soon and the “soon” never happened.
I will keep my learning process and I hope to continue to learn even more from the community.
To end, just a reminder that my blog is not an official statement about Corona or Lua, it is just another opinion, based on my limited experience with the tools, which I clearly stated there.
Again thanks a lot for your feedback!
Alex [import]uid: 4883 topic_id: 906 reply_id: 2110[/import]