In return for an honest review, Al was gracious enough to send me a PDF copy of this book. I promise to be upfront with what I liked while not sugarcoating things that I didn't.

To start off, what I liked. This book is fantastic for people who have never touched Lua in their lives such as myself. Whenever a new script or topic is introduced, instead of simply giving you a script to copy word for word, Al breaks down most of the different elements within the code. Whether it be 20 lines of code or 250, it's broken down into bite-sized pieces to easily understand what everything does. I also like how the topics vary but still tie into one another. You may learn how to make the turtles detect blocks around them and act appropriately early on, and later on that same concept will be used in a much more complicated code. This truly is a great gift or tool for anyone wanting to get into programming.

Now, as for what I consider downsides. The first and most obvious should be that while some of the Lua concepts can be transferred over into real-life applications, the majority of what is used in this book focuses on the Minecraft Java Edition mod called ComputerCraft. So anything like turtle.detect() or turtle.forward() will only apply to this mod and nowhere else. This isn't anything bad with the book itself, but it is something you should consider when purchasing this. If you don't have access to Minecraft Java Edition or mods, it may not be as useful to you as it was for me. And even though much of the code is explained, not everything is. This led me to do research on my own for what certain things are, such as cliArgs.

All in all, this was a great book, and I'm sure I'll keep returning to it to refresh myself whenever I forget something. If you have Minecraft Java Edition and have access to ComputerCraft, and want to begin learning Lua, then this is definitely a book worth buying.