Fastest way to learn how to script?

[Sally Audebarn]

Could someone please tell me the best method of learning how to write scripts in the quickest time possible? Your answers would be much appreciated. The reason why I would like to go through the learning process as expeditiously as possible is because I can only devote a small fraction of my time to secondlife due to my rather time consuming career and busy real life schedule. Thank you in advance :)

[Rolig Loon]

Step One:  Familiarize yourself with the LSL wiki, so that you know where to look for information about the syntax and usage of LSL functions

Step Two:  Spend a little time doing the basic tutorials at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Tutorial or consider taking a course or two in world at Builder's Brewery.

Step Three (the real step):  Get a mess of freebie full perm scripts and start taking them apart and modifying them to understand how they work.  Keep breaking them and adding bells and whistles to make them yours.

If you have any prior experience with writing scripts in any language, you should be up and running in no time.  If you are a raw beginner, .... well, it depends on how much time you have to focus on it and how smart you are.  Scripting is basically logic.  The language is the easy part.

[Sally Audebarn]

Thank you for your response. Approximately how long would it take for me to go through the whole learning process considering that I have no prior knowledge with scripting but I am however a rather fast learner. Could you give me a round estimate?

[Jacki Silverfall]

There are also books available on LSL. Try google, or the library.

[Acheron Gloom]

---

Rolig Loon wrote:

Step One

:  Familiarize yourself with the

LSL wiki

, so that you know where to look for information about the syntax and usage of LSL functions

Step Two

:  Spend a little time doing the basic tutorials at

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Tutorial

 or consider taking a course or two in world at Builder's Brewery.

Step Three

(

the real step

):  Get a mess of freebie full perm scripts and start taking them apart and modifying them to understand how they work.  Keep breaking them and adding bells and whistles to make them yours.

If you have any prior experience with writing scripts in any language, you should be up and running in no time.  If you are a raw beginner, .... well, it depends on how much time you have to focus on it and how smart you are.  Scripting is basically logic.  The language is the easy part.

---

I'd do this, except it may also be helpful to think of something you want to do, and then just do it. And then add more to it. And then improve it, and so on.

Thats basically how I started.

[Rolig Loon]

It's really hard to say how long it will take you. I don't know you.  I can only tell you that I started writing Fortran programs in the mid-1960s, learned a variety of computer languages over the next 40+ years in a career in the sciences, and learned enough LSL in an afternoon to understand how it works.  That's probably not typical.  It's also not how long it took me to get fairly adept at LSL scripting. On the other hand, teen-age kids seem to pick up enough to be scripting fearlessly in a week or two. 

Aside from the fact that LSL is an event-oriented language (and therefore unlike others I had learned), it has two odd quirks:  (1) It has no "official" documentation.  Everything that we know about it, including the entire contents of the LSL wiki, has been deduced through experimentation by users. (2) It evolves rapidly.  Several times a year LL adds new functions, changes parameters, or changes the behavior of existing functions.  If you step away from LSL for very long, by the time you come back it does all sorts of things that weren't there before.

As I said earlier, though, language is not the real challenge in scripting.  That's just rote stuff.  The heart of scripting is logic.  If you can visualize a clear path for doing something and can imagine all the possible ways that a script might screw up and do something else, you can do this.

 

[Void Singer]

learning basic structure and syntax of lsl can be done in a week for a raw beginner. learning all the functions available to use, probably another week, and you'll pick ups some basic methods along the way. putting it all together in a way that's useful beyond the absolute basics, another week. anything past that can take from a week to a lifetime.

and no, that's not concentrated study, but it does take quite a bit of spare time. within 6 mos most people that want to pursue it have the ability to make just about anything their heart desires, and pretty decently too.

if you ever run into code that you can't figure out, just ask, there's lots of neat tricks along the way, and even I don't know all of them (there;s stuff by Strife that I still have to parse through to understand)