Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in XNA) [Paperback]

Bruno Pereira Evangelista (Author), Alexandre Santos Lobao (Author), Riemer Grootjans (Author), Antonio Leal de Farias (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2009 | Series: Expert's Voice in XNA

Would you like to create your own games, but never have the time to dig into the details of multimedia programming? Now you don’t have to! XNA 3.0 makes it simple to create your own games, which will run on your PC and Xbox 360 console. Even if you don’t know how to program at all, Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming: From Novice to Professional will teach you the basics of C# 2008 programming along the way. Don’t get overwhelmed with details you don’t need to know—just learn what you need to start creating your own games right now!

This fast–paced introduction to XNA 3.0 and the C# language provides you with a quick–start guide to creating high–quality XNA games. You’ll be introduced to the key concepts and ideas you need to know in a gradual fashion so that you master one concept before using it as a foundation for the next. Before long, you will have the skills to create smooth, professional–looking results in a range of gaming genres. By the end of the book, you will have constructed several working games and have an excellent knowledge base from which to investigate more advanced techniques.

What you’ll learn

• Master game planning and programming basics
• Understand 2–D graphics, audio, and input basics
• Create your first 2–D game
• Improve your first 2–D game
• Explore the basics of game networking
• Deal with sound in XNA 3.0
• See how to create a 2–D multiplayer game, Rock Rain Live!
• Understand 3–D game programming basics
• Render pipelines, shaders, and effects
• Work with lights, cameras, and transformations
• Generate a terrain
• Learn skeletal animation techniques
• Create a third–person shooter game
• Play games on the Zune console

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone approaching XNA programming for the Xbox 360 for the first time, whether they have experience programming computer games or not.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Bruno Evangelista is a lead programmer at Tectoy Digital (TTD.com). Previously, he was a graphics programmer at Ilusis (Ilusis.com) and a software engineer at Olympya (Olympya.com).

As an XNA developer, Bruno was a finalist in the first and second Microsoft XNA Challenge Brazil. He also maintains an open source skeletal animation library for XNA, named XNAnimation (Codeplex.com/xnanimation).

Besides his professional experience, Bruno had hosted some talks and courses about game development at conferences, including SIBGRAPI, SBGAMES and Microsoft Gamefest (Brazil). Bruno received bachelor's degree in computer science from Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, and is a master's student in computer science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He lives in the beautiful city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. His works can be found at BrunoEvangelista.com.

Alexandre Lobão is a passionate man. His first passion was reading, starting with large books—Mark Twain, Érico Veríssimo, Jules Verne, Monteiro Lobato, Alexandre Dumas, and others—when he was 7. At age 12, he discovered his next two passions: playing and creating games (by that time on his first Apple computer), and writing.

Many years later—he's about forty now—these passions still flourish. Now he's a teacher of academic game development courses, has written four books on the topic, and has participated in Brazilian gamse development contests, both as a contestant and as a judge. He has also written short story books, children's books, and young adult books, and in 2008 he released his first romance, The Name of the Eagle, currently available only in Portuguese. And, of course, he still loves to read, some favorite authors being Ken Follett and Paulo Coelho.

His ultimate passions—starting in 1995 and still burning—are his wife, Waléria, and his kids, Natália and Rafael. Alexandre believes that lives needs passion to be lived entirely, and hopes that this book helps light this passion in readers' hearts. You can find his work at AlexandreLobao.com.

Riemer Grootjans received his degree in electronic engineering with a specialization in informatics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. He is a member of a research team working toward a Ph.D, and is responsible for visualization of 3D data. For several years, Riemer has been maintaining a web site with tutorials for DirectX. Since the early beta stages of XNA in 2006, he has ported all his content to XNA and is helping more than 1,000 people on their path to XNA success every day. In July 2007 and 2008, he received the Microsoft "Most Valuable Professional" Award for his contributions to the XNA community.

José Antonio Leal de Farias has been a games programmer since he acquired his first computer in 1985, when he tried to draw aliens on an 80x25 pixel screen. After obtaining a degree in computer science, he established one of the first game companies in Brazil in 1997, called Hardcode Entertainment. He has worked on many diverse gaming projects in Europe and the U.S. In 2004, he received the "Most Valuable Professional" award from Microsoft for his contributions to the Brazilian coding community. In 2006, he established the Sharp Games community, devoted to studying and spreading advice about the XNA platform. You can find the portal for Sharp Games at SharpGames.net.

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (April 27, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430218177
• ISBN-13: 978-1430218173
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #890,624 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, July 15, 2009

By 

M. Jones (Loma Linda, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in XNA) (Paperback)

Excellent book.

I found this book to be very well written and organized.

I have a B.S. in computer science(grad 2009), however I was very new to both C# and game design in general at the time of purchase. I had watched some of the "beginning XNA" videos on the XNA creators website, that was my first introduction to C# and XNA.

I had originally decided to buy this book after downloading the source code (available for download at apress). After skimming through the source code I was impressed with how readable/organized the code was.

The book does a great job of explaining the concepts of game design with well written sections, informative images, and great source code explanation.

For the most part the authors walk you through a lot of the code line by line. However once in a while the author will add a new object in one place and mention you need to add it in other methods(such as 'load' or 'initialize'), after a while you start to appreciate him skipping over some of the more obvious steps. So while reading be sure to keep an eye out for those.

In summary I would recommend this book to anyone who is comfortable with programming and wants to learn basic game programming.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Book, January 5, 2010

By 

Andrei Mouravski - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in XNA) (Paperback)

I found Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming to be a basic introductory book on
using the XNA Framework. Having already had experience with XNA before I found
that the book was often times difficult to read if you were looking to learn a
single topic. The book does have a very good progression of topics lined up
in terms of introducing a novice to game development. It begins by having you
develop a basic 2D game and then takes you through adding networking, and
developing for the Zune. It then starts over again with a new project to
introduce 3D concepts.

Before each chapter new version of a game there is always a chapter or two that
introduces the upcoming material in a general sense. This gives the authors an
opportunity to explain new topics like networking or 3D mathematics in detail
without distracting from the design of the game later on.

I would recommend this book to new users of the XNA Framework, but if you have
had experience before and are already comfortable with the system I would
suggest picking up a copy of XNA 3.0 Game Programming Recipes by
Riemer Grootjans instead.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book for XNA I've read, January 23, 2010

By 

Sylvia Wei (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in XNA) (Paperback)

I've tried several other XNA books after I went through the 2.0 version of this book, and found them lacking in comparison. This book cover everything quite thoroughly, including bone animation of 3d models (in the fps tutorial), pretty decent way to organize your code, and so on. And the reviewers complaining about the codes in the book.... seems to not understand that they should download the source code for the book from the website, or they'd have none of those problems. The book explain how to do the codes, its not supposed to be a source code repository, when you can just open the source codes with a text editor.

If you're a total newbie in programming, already good with XNA, don't want a book you'll go back to after you finish reading it, and can't download the source code from the website, then avoid this book... If you want a book to take you far from the novice stage, one that you'll go back to later on in case you forget something, this book is a wonderful asset.