Lua tutorial help for Python programmer?

[Skip Montanaro]

I just got Lua scripting dumped in my lap as a way to do some server
side scripting in Redis. The very most basic stuff isn't too hard (i =
1, a = {"x"=4, ...}, for i = 1,10,2 do ... end), but as soon as I get
beyond that, I find it difficult to formulate questions which coax
Google into useful suggestions. Is there an equivalent to the
python-tutor, python-help, or even this (python-list/comp.lang.python)
for people to ask Lua questions from the perspective of a Python
programmer? Maybe an idiom translation table?

A couple questions to show what sort of (terribly basic) stuff I'm after.

1. print(tbl) where tbl is a Lua table prints something useless like

table: 0x3c73310

How can I print a table in one go so I see all its keys and values?

2. The redis-py package helpfully converts the result of HGETALL to a
Python dictionary. On the server, The Lua code just sees an
interleaved list (array?) of the key/value pairs, e.g., "a" "1" "b"
"2" "c" "hello". I'd dictify that in Python easily enough:

dict(zip(result[::2], result[1::2]))

and get {"a": "1", "b": "2", "c": "hello"}

Skimming the Lua reference manual, I didn't see anything like dict()
and zip(). I suspect I'm thinking like a Python programmer when I
shouldn't be. Is there a Lua idiom which tackles this problem in a
straightforward manner, short of a numeric for loop?

As you can see, this is pretty trivial stuff, mostly representing
things which are just above the level of the simplest tutorial.

Thanks,

Skip