LSL 101/In the Beginning

← A Gentle Introduction

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Simple Script Skeleton →

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This thread of A Gentle Introduction is written especially for the Second Life user that has some building experience, but little or no scripting (or other programming) experience. It is divided into "lessons" that are intended to be read sequentially. Most lessons will take the form of an example script, followed by a discussion of anything that is newly introduced by that script. If we've written the lessons successfully and you read them sequentially, you should never come to a page with vocabulary or concepts that are unfamiliar but not explained in that lesson.

On the other hand, we don't necessarily try to explain everything about a topic in the lesson it is first introduced. If you're looking for the full details of any particular topic, see the section Language Topics in Focus.

Our examples will be full scripts that you can copy into SL and run yourself. You can make modifications and run those, to verify that your understanding matches what SL actually does. One consequence of that though, is that in a few cases (especially in the beginning), the structure of LSL forces us to include something in the example that we're not ready to explain. When this happens, we'll call it to your attention so you're not left wondering whether you've missed something.

As you read these pages, if you do come to a place where you feel we haven't adequately explained the example, or are making unwarranted assumptions about the target audience's background knowledge, please let us know. On each Wiki page, there is a tab labeled discussion. Click on that tab and tell us what you think. Don't worry if you don't know the Wiki editing conventions; we'll figure out your intent. If you have general comments that are relevant to more than one lesson, there is a forum discussion that is a great place to post your thoughts.

Finally if you are an experienced scripter who is reading these pages out of curiosity and comes across something you could improve, feel free to jump in and do it. This is, after all, a Wiki.

Though this series of lessons is designed to be read sequentially, you may sometimes have a desire to jump back and forth between lessons. So here's a table of contents.

• Simple Script Skeleton
• Comments, White-space and Formatting
• Strings and Simple Output
• LSL 101/Integers
• The touch_start Event
• Creating a Script
• Compile Time Errors
• Functions That Return a Value
• String Concatenation
• Variables
• Global vs Local Variables
• Variable Initialization
• Event Handler Parameters