How to start [Mudlet]

Skye

I know most people these days would just redirect you to Omnipave or SVO as a go-to for systems. But what sort of non-"just download Omni" advice would you give to someone who has nearly no coding experience but wants to try and build their own system from scratch?

Some things to consider I guess:

1) What is the most basic knowledge they would need to acquire first?
2) Instead of giving them a big sample of code they can't decipher, where would you start for a step by step explanation? Would you try to explain to them the use of GMCP from the start or just introduce them first to basic variables?
3) How to build a good foundation so you don't wind up having to redo everything for little changes
4) Special applications: Getting creative with tables and GUI

Fendo

Here's what I can offer, I will warn you, I do have coding experience as far as the games go from ZMUD > Mudlet and spend a bit of time doing it outside of games, so it was a little bit of an easier transition than no experience. 

1). http://wiki.mudlet.org/w/Manual:Introduction  -- This is a really basic explanation of the easiest parts of Mudlet, Triggers, Aliases, Variables, Buttons, and a little bit of touching on some regex. 

2). http://wiki.mudlet.org/w/Manual:Technical_Manual -- This is what I used going to Mudlet, It goes over quite a few things (tables GUI's and about everything else you can work with in Mudlet that I know of) and links over to many other parts of it. 

http://wiki.mudlet.org/w/Manual:Geyser -- This is the main manual I used for the GUI I run with. 
http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#pdf-string.sub -- The Lua Manual is good to read through when you need certain things that you can't find in the Mudlet manual easily.

3). Basically, this will depend on a few things: Game mechanics changing and how you code everything. Some things will cause bigger changes than others and the important part if you're working on it yourself (Or Using another persons code) is that you understand what to change to correct the issues that may crop up. Biggest thing I can stress is doing it yourself from scratch will take some time and for that you will know the ins and outs of your systems. 

The main reason people point to Omnipave or SVO is since it's easier to get it up and running quicker. I hop between both of them a bit and both are good to work with. Omnipave3 is a good one to  look at to see how the system can be coded from the start. SVO is a bit harder since all the code isn't easily accessible. So if you wanted to see how the code works together in a system, Omnipave3 is a good one to look at even to pull examples from and learn with.

I know a lot of what I had to do to  help is point you to links, but I hope they're as helpful to you as they were to me!