The game examples in the book are necessarily short and simple to understand. The downloading and installing of Corona should be straightforward for most readers. Ah, but be aware of the following, which the author quickly tells you in the first chapter. If you just want to write code that will run under the Corona Simulator, then you do not need to install XCode (which is from Apple) or the Android SDK (supplied by Google). But let's be realistic. Most readers will have an ultimate goal of writing games that will actually run on the iPhone or on a phone using Android. What this means is that for the iPhone (or iPad), you'll have to pay for an iOS application developer license from Apple, which is currently $99 a year. Please do not bemoan this cost. It is still essentially free, compared to how much time you will be coding.
Or suppose you are going to Android. Fernandez suggests that you can avoid downloading the Android SDK unless you will need the ADB tool it has, so that you can simplify your builds and see debug messages. My advice is to go ahead and get the Android SDK. It's worth it down the road.
As for the current book, it quickly revs you up with some short example snippets. Including, sigh, the stereotypical Hello World. I guess the field has standardised on this.
The book also teaches Lua. A popular scripting language for game coders. Some resemblences to JavaScript and ActionScript. The syntax is simple. Though I really do wish they would close statements with semicolons. Lua's designers decided to presumably simplify the looks. But if you have written in enough languages, you should know that having a definite and explicit statement closure symbol is a good thing. C.!C, C++, java, C# etc. What this tells you about Lua is that its code is then by necessity made of short lines. The end of line or newline symbol appears to be the statement ending symbol.
However, as we go further into the book, I do have to say, against earlier expectations, that it seems you can indeed write games of some sophistication in Lua. Especially impressive was the inclusion of a physics engine, so that games can take advantage of a player's intuition.
