XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide [Anglais] [Broché]

I've pretty much read most of the XNA books available. A lot of them will explain how XNA works, but fail to take the reader through the completion of a significant game. I feel that hand holding a person through the creation of complete, sufficient, healthy games is more important in the long run than explaining exactly what each overloaded SpriteBatch.Draw() method does (that's what MSDN is for). Sure, you need to explain to the reader how sprites are drawn to the screen, but you don't need to go crazy with the specifics. This book explains enough to the reader so they have a understanding of what's going on, without bogging them down with too much information.

XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example wastes no time in diving into code, creating what is exceedingly a simple game, but builds a strong foundation for the other games which will be built. The reader will learn by doing, progressively increasing their knowledge of XNA and learning how to develop a game. There are times when the author will gloss over specific details, details that I feel should have been explained a bit more, but any successful programmer will investigate topics of interest on their own anyways.

The book doesn't assume any previous C# knowledge, or programming knowledge if I'm not mistaken. I'm going to raise a huge flag and say you should be a competent programmer before diving into this book. Don't get this book if you've never written any type of program on your own, and I'm not talking about just a "Hello World" program either. I promise that you really won't understand what's going on and once you leave sample land, you'll be completely lost. Understand that game programming is an extremely elitest form of software development, even with XNA. So with that said, this book is aimed at complete beginners to XNA and game programming, but not programming in general. You may do alright if you don't know C# yet, but do know Java (preferably) or even C++.

Also note, this book doesn't explain anything specific to Windows Phone 7 game programming. If Windows Phone 7 game programming is your ultimate goal, you can still use this book to learn XNA, and then move onto the many tutorials and guides available on the new App Hub website.

When I started this book, I had some experience with game programming from a python class and making a game in HTML5 and JavaScript. However, I had always been interested the XNA framework and this book is a great introduction to said framework. While most programming books teach you a lot of theory and try to explain in words what is happening in a certain loop or piece of code, this book however has you type out the code itself. I feel that programming is a skill that requires you to actually implement the idea in order to understand it, so this book takes a good approach at teaching in such a way. This book does lots of things right. The pace that the book takes is exceptional. It starts you off with simple things like how to move and different properties of the draw method and ends with a project that combines all the ideas that you learned throughout the book and how to effectively manage all the resources. It also provides you with some good tools that you can use in any game project such as a tile creator and helpful ways to set-up constructor classes. The code that is in the book is easily modifiable and made in such ways the code is reusable. I don't have too many complaints about this book. The only problem I had with the book is that it could have taught more. Although this is a beginner's guide, I felt at times they were only a step away from teaching you something that could have been VERY useful, but didn't for the sake of simplicity. Overall, I enjoyed this book and felt the book had a very nice flow. While not much XNA 4.0 literature is out right now, this book is great start and is sure to inspire many great games, possibly one of my own!

I have purchased over a dozen books on C# and XNA Game Studio. This is the best one yet.

It is very good because:

The author explains the concept, shows you the code, and explains what is happening in the code
(enough detail but not too much detail)

The sample games present some very helpful concepts. I would say that it goes beyond
a beginner course.

For example, the 'Robot Rampage' game clarified the following:
enemy AI to pursue the player; bypassing obstacles on the play field
using a play area larger then the screen; by using a camera class
creating a random play environment for each new game
creating explosions of different sizes
utilizing 'Manager' classes to control the objects

In summary, this book was very helpful.