XNA Game Studio Express:
Developing Games for Windows and the Xbox 360
Written by Joseph B. Hall
Published by Course Technology PTR (Thompson)
Paperback, 700+ pages
Release date September 5th, 2007
About the Author
Joseph Hall has been a professional software developer for more than 16 years. He worked as a programmer for Microsoft and IBM, and he was the software architect for a Fortune 500 bank before starting his own consulting company in 2006. Joe makes his living writing desktop, web, and mobile device applications for businesses, but game programming is his passion, and it was gaming that got him into programming in the first place. He was a member of the original Xbox team and he joined the Visual Studio .NET team just after the Xbox was released in 2001. Joe applies his unique blend of development experiences to help you explore the exciting new arena of game development for the masses that is known as XNA Game Studio Express.
About the Book
This book is divided into four parts. Part one ("Building Blocks", chapters 1 - 12) introduces you to the XNA technologies and takes you through the process of setting up and configuring your development environment to create games for Windows and the Xbox 360, and it explores the major feature areas of the XNA Framework APIs by developing example games that demonstrate each. Part two ("Genre Studies", chapters 13 - 18) builds on what you learned in the earlier chapters to write (six) actual games. In part three ("Components, Libraries, and Tools", chapters 19 - 24), you learn how to segment your code into generic component libraries so that you can reuse your work, rather than reinventing it with each new game. Part four ("Tasty Bits", chapters 25 - 31) explores more advanced concepts like threading, performance tuning, and localization.
Each of the four parts of the book begins with an overview of what you can expect to learn in its chapters, and every chapter ends with review questions and exercises to help make sure that you understand the concepts that are covered. The games and example code in this book were designed with a focus on illustrating the concepts that are covered within the chapter in which they are developed. As a consequence, they are not polished, commercially-viable titles. But, they are a great place for you to explore and experiment with the XNA Framework, and they provide a good starting point for you to bring your own gaming visions to life.
Audience
I would love to say that you should buy this book if you're able to read and comprehend written text. I would love to say that you can pick up a book and a compiler and start writing games after just a weekend of reading. I can't say that, though. I've made every attempt to make sure that someone who is new to game programming can easily follow the progression of ideas and concepts from introduction to implementation, while still keeping the interest of those programmers who have dabbled in game development or have written complete games, but this book will not teach you how to program.
If you have had any experience with writing programs (on any platform, in any language) you should be able to follow the examples in this book without any problems. If you don't know what loops, variables, methods, and arrays are then it's time to pick up a good introduction to the C# language to which you can refer as you read this book. Games are frequently trivialized since they lie squarely within the real of recreation and entertainment, but game programming is actually one of the most cerebral forms of programming that you'll ever do.
I hope that I haven't scared you off. If you have a passion for games, and you have a vision that you would like to see come to life, then I firmly believe that you can make it happen, and I believe that this book will help you. I just don't want you to think that you'll be writing the next Quake or Gran Turismo in a weekend, especially if you've never written a line of code in your life. Read the book. Answer the review questions. Work through the exercises. Modify the example code. By testing your assumptions, you'll be able to know when you've mastered the material. Then you can combine those core concepts in different ways to create great games.
More Details
Please click on the following links for more information about each of the four parts of the book and their chapters. There, you will find links to videos and downloads for the examples from the book.
If you like what you see, click the link on
my homepage to purchase the book, or just head over to your local book store to pick up a copy.