Addons for dummies

[Mirrikh]

This was probably asked many times before, and i most likely know the answer, but would anyone have kind of newbie guide to lua/addon creating. I know theres sites on learning lua and creating addons, but i feel its easier to learn it from someone firsthand instead of a "textbook" per-say. I guess for starters, i would focus on learning to create unitframes. Any and all advise/knowledge is welcomed.

[Kkthnx]

Originally Posted by Mirrikh This was probably asked many times before, and i most likely know the answer, but would anyone have kind of newbie guide to lua/addon creating. I know theres sites on learning lua and creating addons, but i feel its easier to learn it from someone firsthand instead of a "textbook" per-say. I guess for starters, i would focus on learning to create unitframes. Any and all advise/knowledge is welcomed.

I know you do not want a (Textbook) and so on. But a good place to start would to learn from a site / book in my honest thought. You can also look at other peoples code and learn a lot from them and write it your own way. Run with it and make into whatever you really want. Im sure Phanx will comment on this too. But I will leave this here too for you just to see as it might help. if you are unsure of things just post your code and get some advice about how to approach it. (Nothing is impossible) Also there is nothing wrong with asking questions.

http://www.friendlydruid.com/2014/01...roduction.html

[Mirrikh]

thnx, hopefully i get a hang of it

[Phanx]

Originally Posted by Kkthnx But a good place to start would to learn from a site / book in my honest thought. You can also look at other peoples code and learn a lot from them and write it your own way.

Personally, I've never found books or specific tutorials useful for learning a programming language. The tutorials are always completely pointless and mind-numbingly boring, and it's a huge turn-off. I'd much rather just take someone else's existing code that does something similar to what I want to do, learn the basics from reading that, and then use the relevant API documentation to figure out how to do specific things. Other than my own code (obviously ) I would recommend looking at any of Tekkub's or Industrial's addons. While there are several other authors who spring to mind as having "nice" code, their addons are big and complex, so I can't really recommend them as examples for beginners.

If you're more of a book learner, though, or like working through tutorials, I know other people have found the World of Warcraft Programming book helpful.

Stay far, far away from the "examples" you will find on sites like ArenaJunkies. Most of the people who post code on those sites have absolutely no idea what they are doing, and write some of the worst code I have ever seen in any language. The examples on Wowpedia are not much better, but at least Wowpedia has accurate and useful API information.

You can find some more links to sites with API documentation etc here:
http://phanx.net/addons/resources
(Yes, I know there's a forum thread with the same links, but I don't know that URL offhand, and I don't have any advertising or other crap on my site, so I don't feel bad about linking to it. )

[Seerah]

For learning Lua basics, I found the tutorials at http://lua-users.org/wiki/TutorialDirectory helpful.

[Cairenn]

Also feel free to come hang out in the IRC channel as well if you wish.

IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/WoWUIDev