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"Yet here I am. 5 months later. Working on my 3rd time through the WoW Wiki, able to only get halfway through the LUA manual before getting so lost I have to start over..."
The Lua manual is written for C (and C++) programmers, so it's going to be a very tough read for a non-programmer. If you want less terse documentation, the book might be a little better (haven't read it myself).
Basically, you need to learn to program, starting from square one. HTML doesn't prepare you because it's not a programming language at all (the "ML" stands for "markup language" -- it's a document layout language). New programmers, and programmers learning a new language, usually start with this:
print ("Hello World")
What is print? (a function) What is a function? What is "Hello World" (string data). What is string data? Are the quotes necessary? Are the parenthesis necessary? Is the white space necessary? There are a lot of questions that could be asked about even this basic code, and you need to understand the answers before you can begin to make sense of stuff like:
_G.print [[Hello World]]
v, s = print,[[Hello World]] v(s)
io.write(string.format('%s %s\n', "Hello", 'World'))
t={print,"Hello",' ',"World"} t[1](t[2]..t[3]..t[4])
(which all produce the same result as print("Hello World") )
But you have to start simple. You write very small, simple programs that print output on the screen. Then you learn to use simple variables, learn about different types, learn about what syntax is required for them, learn about control flow statements (if,else,while,for,etc.), learn about data structures, learn how to write functions, etc. You will be writing dumb little programs that print your name on the screen 10 times, or translate Celsius in to Fahrenheit, or play guessing games.
Then, once you understand basic programming concepts and how they are expressed in Lua, you have to learn to program WoW. This is a totally different subject. You have to learn where WoW expects you to put your code, you need to learn it's API (application programmers interface) which tells you what functions WoW provides a programmer to allow the programmer to get information about what's going on in the game and to manipulate the user interface. This is a learning curve in of itself -- understanding programming and/or Lua is just a prerequisite.
Five months is more than enough time to do this. You've just had the wrong approach. Baby steps, man. If you dive straight into the deep end, you'll drown.
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