There's deep stuff there (look into coroutines and metatables), but Lua has been carefully designed so that it doesn't get in the way. If all you want from Lua is a (JSON-like) format for data dumps or config files, you can safely ignore the rest of the language. It's like the opposite of C++ that way. :)
That is exactly how I introduced Lua in to one of our projects: as a very - little code way to handling a complex configuration situation. It grew in to full scriptability.
