XNA Game Studio Express Developing Games for Windows and the Xbox 360




XNA Game Studio Express: Developing Games for Windows and the Xbox 360 is the ultimate resource for hobbyists and students who want to write games for Windows and the Xbox 360 game console. Learn how you can create your own games using the amazing tools of XNA and Game Studio Express, the free game development tools and APIs from Microsoft, based on the incredibly popular Visual Studio IDE. You’ll begin with an introduction to the XNA platform and the Game Studio Express development environment. From there, you’ll examine many different game genres and will develop your own working games. You’ll also cover writing components and libraries and will develop reusable code that can be plugged into your game projects. Wrap things up with a collection of more advanced topics. To get the most out of this unique guide you will need a working knowledge of programming, but readers with a variety of backgrounds will still benefit from the comprehensive coverage found inside. XNA will turn players into developers, doing for game creation what YouTube and myspace have done for music and video.

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars xcellent!
Caveat: I have known and worked professionally with the author, Joe Hall, for a few years, and found him to be highly qualified, extremely sharp, laser-focused, and very well-spoken. So naturally I had very high expectations for this book.

I was not disappointed… in fact I was pleasantly surprised!

Joe gives enough information so that those new to game programming can follow along and figure it out, but he does so without boring the more experienced reader. Buy it, read it, do it - it’s fun!

4 Stars Easy to read, very concise book about XNA
Just real brief - this book is a must for developers who are familiar with programming concepts (i.e. conditions, loops, etc), and who wish to dabble in XNA. XNA’s a different beast in itself, as the book will explain - and the author will strive to explain every single detail about the code he uses and the formulas he places in them. Reason why I only rated this book a 4 out of 5 is because all the code in the book is based off of XNA 1.0 - and the current version, XNA 2.0, deprecates some of the programs in the book. You can download the code from his site, however - but often times I want to be able to just thumb through the code in the book and not worry whether or not the code’s deprecated. Otherwise, it’s a highly recommendable book.

4 Stars Beginner Book
Great for new person to XNA. General OO programming knowledge required, but the basics of game design are there.

3 Stars Great- But Major Pitfalls
I’m sorry to go against the grain here and write a review that doesn’t praise this book like the bible, but really, it doesn’t deserve the reviews it has gotten thus far.

The first few chapters are easy going enough, no problems there. But then when you get to the actual code, you’re in for one hell of a ride.

- The code isn’t highlighted in any way, making it hard to read.

- The author doesn’t even explain the code- just gives brief summaries on what to expect.

- More irritating (and the reason I rated it a 3/5) is the fact that you won’t know where the code goes. At all. The author just gives you the code and expects you to know XNA well enough to know where it should go. (It doesn’t even show you where the code should go in correlation with other bits of code). The solution? The CD has the code on it. If you get this book, you will NEED the CD if you want to learn anything at all.

- The CD barely functions under my installation of Vista. The auto-install feature for XNA/C# didn’t work, leaving me to find the downloads on my own (which wasn’t so bad, really)

- The author’s sense of humor is really stale. I pictured the author as one of those dungeons and dragons geeks. If you read this book, you’ll know what I mean.

- This book puts a heavy emphasis on math. And guess what: it isn’t explained. Be prepared to learn more about trigonometry from Google, because you won’t learn it here. (Sine waves functions, radians, functions for degrees, angles, etc etc)

- The author states that the code isn’t optimized, since he wants the reader to understand the concepts. This is just an easy way out for him! Not only does he use TRIGONOMETRY where it DOESN’T need to be used, but he does it in a fashion that isn’t, in his words, “optimized.”

But what I can say about the book is the examples are nice. The code compiles cleanly. I did learn a lot, albeit I needed Google to help explain it.

Overall I’d say I’ve had more success learning from examples on the Microsoft Knowledgebase and user-created sites. I only look at this book when I need to.

4 Stars Great 2D book. Works with 2.0
This book talks about 3D, but it’s main focus is 2D. I would have liked to seen some more information on 3D, but obviously you can only fit so many things in a book. This book was released after the 1.0 refresh was out, but it still has it’s own font class instead of using the built in font class in XNA. This annoyed me a little, but nothing major.

The author does a great job at explaining most of the code. He has good text information as well. My biggest complaint was all of the “redundant” 2D games. Granted, they are different games but it is really more of the same. This is just my jaded view to wish there was more information on 3D.

If you are looking for only 2D games, this is the book for you. It also has some basic info on 3D that is beneficial, but if you are looking to actually create a 3D game you will want to grab a different XNA book on the market. Check my reviews to see which ones I like. This book gets my second highest review because it is such a good book. The author did a great job … main reason for the dock of one star is for the lack of 3D content.

The book has updated code and doesn’t seem to change to much from what is printed in the book. That is a good thing!

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