Customer Reviews

Beginning XNA 2.0 Game Programming: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in Game Programming)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book doesn't beat around the bush, which can be a good thing for an already experienced developer. However if you aren't experienced it could easily leave you lost. If you are a "novice" like the book claims to cater too you'll probably never get to them without further reading from other materials.

The QC for this book was very poorly done. There are tons of errors in the spelling and in the code. They completely forgot to explain certain things and then expect you to have figured them out on your own later.

The book covers a decent amount of useful information, but it seems like they just pushed it out a bit too soon. If they had gone through the tutorials and tried them out and made sure all the steps were covered, it would have been a lot nicer to learn with. Instead the tutorials left me lost most of the time. I spent hours trying to figure out what steps they forgot to include.

I think this book could be quite a useful tool if you are already well versed in the .net C# environment. However I would recommend a different approach if you have little C# experience.

You should understand C# code before diving into this book. I tried online tutorials and nothing comes close to just reading and using this book! Although there were a few places where I had to use an online resource to figure out exactly what the author was talking about, it still supasses any other online XNA intro.

I found this book on the web and still decided to buy it. The book is the easiest time I think I have ever had learning XNA, however, like all programming books it seems that only experienced coders who correct errors as they read are the ones in charge of editing and quality control.

For example, on page 46 it tells you to include a line of code that doesn't seem to make sense (private SpriteBatch spriteBatch = null;) in the Game1 code. This of course is redundant and cause the game not to compile. And.... naturally, the downloaded source code runs fine. Why? Because this line of code is not in the project. I imagine the XNA guru they had reviewing this book (how come they don't hand the book to a total newbie and say 'here, follow this book exactly and tell us when the code examples dont work') fixed the errors he seen on the fly without thinking ..oh, a total newbie won't know this is an obvious mistake..

But I can honestly say I have NEVER read a 'teach yourself' programming book with flawless code examples. And of course the downloaded source always works and you just have to compare your file with thier file and see what is different. The only positive note I can say about the poor state of quality control with newbie programming books in general is that in a way it teaches you to troubleshoot code. But, for someone who is completely new and doesn't pick up on these things it is very frustrating. I'm lucky now in that I have learned enough that I can fix these errors, but a few years ago I would have just tossed this book out of frustration when I do exactly as instructed and it still doesnt work.

To the people who write these books I have a suggestion....

If the person in charge of quality control has ever written a single line of code they are not qualified to review a book targeting newbies. Give the book to your spouse, neighbor, 12 year old, etc. who will quickly hand it back to you 5 times every chapter and say 'hey, I did what it said and got a bunch of errors', or 'hey, it assumes here on page whatever I know where to type this'.

Now, all that being said, this is a darn good book. The authors make XNA and XBOX programming about as simple as possible... the examples are explained very well and easy to follow. If you have gone through another C# teach yourself newbie book you should minimal trouble getting a game up and running in just an hour or so!

This is a great book to help you get started with XNA. I like the fact that it's straight and to the point with no fluff. Covers 2D and 3D game programming including skeletal animation. All sample code compiles and runs as advertised and is explained in detail. I had a bad experience with another XNA book so I'm glad I found this one.

A fair addition to anyone's XNA library, but far from complete. The first half of the book is a good tutorial on building a 2D game from scratch. The second half makes an attempt to cover 3D programming. Given the steep learning curve behind 3D development (linear algebra, lighting and rendering, the programmable pipeline, etc.) where the subject matter could easily fill more than one book, the authors simply present the source code for each chapter with little explanation over what the average developer could grasp by simply looking at the code. Worse, certain subjects such as HLSL are discussed with such little depth that they should have been left out entirely. Combined with a decent game math book, a book on HLSL and the XNA documentation, this book will at least get you started with XNA development.

I recently picked up this book and it's great !!...it's clear, and it's perfect for those people who want to understand the XNA bases, but at the same time, start to create by themselfs.
Even if you aren't a programmer, this book will guide you step by step trough all the process, from a basic game to a complex character animation.
In short, this book is an excellent starting point for people who want to learn XNA and get involved in the videogames world.

If you are just getting into game programming, XNA is a terrific framework to use, and this book, despite it's flaws, is a great way to get started.

The 2-D material, which takes up a little over half the book, walks you through pretty much everything you need to create a fully functional asteroids-esque clone, and even shows you how to make it playable online, multiplayer. The examples are explained well, done slowly, and while there are a few errors here and there, it's pretty accurate for the most part.

The 3-d material, in the last part of the book, started out ok, but ultimately left me wanting. It seemed to make the bad assumption that "since we're all experts on 2-d XNA programming, the book can slack off on explaining some of the details with 3-d XNA programming." The book also assumes that many of the rather difficult concepts that simply come with the territory of 3-d programming (matricies, transformations, effects, textures, etc.) are just *understood* by the reader. I'm still not completely clear on what an "effect" is (it was never clearly defined / explained). The examples jump around a lot too. I would be anything that the authors of the 2-d and 3-d sections are different -- it seems too different stylistically. The authors seem to forget that this is a BEGINNING book and try to instead speed towards stuff that "looks cool" for wow factor.

It would have been better to break this book up into two books, one for 2-d programming and one for 3-d programming, so that they can spend more time walking through the 3-d programming details. (It'd be nice to get some more practice with 2-d).

Also -- you may want to look into the 3.0 edition, I have heard they corrected many of the errors from this edition.

That said -- it would probably be worth spending a few bucks to buy a used copy of this book (or maybe buying the ebook?). Be sure to download the source code from apress.com -- you'll need it for some of the media files!

This book is absolutely horrible! I've followed the steps to make the first project in chapter 2 five times in both XNA 2.0 and XNA 3.0, and it won't even compile. I'm no slouch in programming either. In fact, I downloaded the source code from the web site, and even THAT has compile errors!!! Even worse, the book doesn't even tell you what code they want you to put in to the editor and what code they are just sampling for you, meaning you have to decipher that to even stand a chance at a working game. (For example, chapter 2 claims that you would have only entered a single line of code, but if you look at the example code, you would have to type almost a full paragraph). This book claims to be for novices, but if you don't already have XNA experience, STAY AWAY.

I would like to say that the book is good, it covers a lot of material pretty well and the downloadable code is just excellent(the one in the book has errors or is not full). Well structured classes, usage of game components and services, no out-dated name conventions. The code can be downloaded and is up-to-date.

The problem is that the book covers a lot and does not explain it fully, the HLSL is really ran over through. There are portions of source that are not explained either. At places the book feels like source code listing rather than book. I think the book should be revised so that it includes better and thorough explanations of everything!. The 2D part I have not read. What I was looking for was the 3D and I have read 4 chapters so far and it is good that I had some background experience with 3D and XNA. Otherwise I would have felt completely lost. I found myself pondering over code (especially the shader code) trying to connect 2 and 2. This is not a good way to teach, by giving source code and explaining here and there.

First off this book is not for a beginning programmer. You must have at least some knowledge of object oriented programming before using this book. A basic knowledge of C, C++, or C# would also help a lot. Along with that, a slightly more-than-basic knowledge of the .NET framework is necessary.

If you have all those, this is a great book. The explanations of XNA code and corresponding programs is easy to follow. If you read the code and try to understand it without blindly copying it, you will learn a lot from this book.

There are some errors throughout the book, but most of them are minor; if you have a programming background, you can get through most of them with little trouble.

Overall, this book is for someone who is a beginner at XNA, not at programming all together.