Customer Reviews

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

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

It's what I ordered. Lots of detail and steps and just what I needed to get into XNA programming.

I am trying to learn XNA on my own. My skills as a programmer are very low, but have been able to code a very simple version of pong (in XNA) on my own. I turn to these books because I need more guidance in the world of XNA. This book "Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming: From Novice to Professional" is a disaster. The authors, who are professional programmers, failed to go through their code properly. In chapter 3 you begin a very simple 2D game. There are a couple cases where the author fails to be specific when telling you where to type your code. I also had problems with the author failing to state that you need to declare more variables at the top of your class. They just skip over them. I had to open up the sample file (downloadable from [...]) to check my code, because the book is missing necessary code. Here I found a plethora of issues of which the book ignored important steps, or misplaced code. I copied the necessary code from the compete file and placed it in my code. I was able to get many issues taken care of, but the game still won't run. I had all these problems between the pages 41 and 49. The game consisted of a background and a spaceship that moves on the screen. The end of page 49 tells you to test the project and it doesn't work. I have run through this code several times and I have tried to fix it on my own. I have had little to no success. I can't continue on, because I can't test my code.

This is very frustrating because I am a beginner. If I was advanced in XNA and I could remedy these issues on the fly, then I wouldn't need this book. The programmers who wrote this book need to check the entire book, instead of making a quick update for a quick buck! Now I have wasted time and money and I have learned nothing.

I just recently purchased this book because it said it was for a novice, by the dictionary definition a novice is someone with no previous knowledge, and this book does not start at a novice level. This book starts at an intermediate level and ends at a professional level. In one chapter of the book they even tell you that they are not going to write a HUGE section of the code, they say if you want it you MUST go to their web-site and download the source code, which you would have already done any ways because of all the errors in the book code.
Bottom line DO NOT get this book unless you already have extensive knowledge of programming.