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23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Introduction to Game Programming with XNA, July 16, 2007
This review is from: Microsoft XNA Game Studio Creators Guide: An Introduction to XNA Game Programming (Paperback)
I was excited to see this book arrive from Amazon so quickly and couldn't wait to look at the newest XNA game programming book. Although, I was somewhat disappointed when I first opened the box from Amazon and did a quick look through pages. Realizing this book was far more basic than what the description on Amazon lead me to believe. However, as I read through the book and ran the example downloaded code I realized this really was a good introduction to game programming.
Pros
* Provides a good introduction to many fundamental game programming concepts
* Doesn't jump right into 3D mathematics as many intro game programming books do, I feel this gives the reader a better grasp for how to apply 3D math later in the book
* Good examples of the 3D math concepts provided in example code, not many programming books do this
* Chapters are short, easy to read and understand
* Covers some of the more basic tools a beginning game programmer will use
* Provides a lot of example code that compiles and runs without troubles
* Book does cover some more advanced concepts that will certainly be useful to any level of user
Cons
* Wish the example code was highlighted a little better in the books text
* Example code uses some dated conventions (Hungarian notation) which somewhat date the code
* Would have liked to see some more detailed examples and a game or two that brought the concepts together
* Some of the chapters are a little too short for my liking considering some of the concepts this book covers
If you are looking for a good introduction to game programming with XNA I would recommend this book. Those with some game programming experience looking for an introduction to XNA may be a little disappointed but overall I feel this is a good title for any novice.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Introduction to XNA concepts and bad programming practices, December 20, 2007
This review is from: Microsoft XNA Game Studio Creators Guide: An Introduction to XNA Game Programming (Paperback)
I'm an experienced programmer, and a professional game developer, so I'm not exactly the audience that the authors were shooting for. (They claim to be shooting for "beginning to intermediate" programmers in the introduction.)
This book does serve to describe some of the concepts in XNA that I was unfamiliar with, but I found the text written poorly and the code written unprofessionally.
Even for a beginning audience, there were factual errors in the text that are at best misleading, and certainly contribute to a misunderstanding of the processes involved. For example, when discussing pixel shaders, the authors claim that the output gets sent to the graphics card one pixel at a time. This is false, as the pixel shader is running on the graphics card already, except in the exceptionally rare (and ill-documented) case of running with a reference rasterizer on the CPU.
The organization is questionable, with topics used before they're explained (chapters 13, 14, and 15 are on vectors, matrices, and cameras, which are important foundations for chapters both before and after). Within chapters, code is presented in a half-tutorial fashion, but without enough guidance to really follow along.
The diagrams are typically not helpful, including screenshots that don't do a good job of illustrating the concepts at hand. A case in point, Figure 20-1 tries to show "before and after directional lighting". Any still image is going to be hard pressed to accomplish this. More useful would be a reference to an interactive demo.
The book has a zip file that can be downloaded from the publisher's website, which is of some use, but it doesn't seem to agree with some of the references in the book, including discussion of how to use the authors' framework, which is a starting point for much of the code in the book.
This was written before the release of Game Studio 2.0, so some of the book is already out of date, including comments that there is no networking support, and a strange admonition that writing networked games "might be potentially unsafe".
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So Far So Good (UPDATED!!!), November 12, 2007
This review is from: Microsoft XNA Game Studio Creators Guide: An Introduction to XNA Game Programming (Paperback)
I dont know what other people are saying about this guide, but i can tell you, from my personal experience, that this is a GREAT book.
When you first get the book, the opening chapter was confusing to figure out, after 2 hours of monkeying around i got it. After that, everything else went smooth. And i am learning really cool things. The end of the chapter exercises are fun, not to challenging, but enough to make you learn.
How to Hate this Book: Know about XNA when you buy it, and also have a good grasp on particle systems, controls, cameras, vectors, matrices, primitives, adding models, animation, hit detection.
How to Love this book: Dont know anything about XNA, But have some knowledge of what a vertex is. Or what a Color is, Drr?, and most of all.... Dont just expect to know how to be a bomb programmer just by reading this book. Books are just instruments to give you insight into a complex machine. Most of the learning should be done by experimentation.
Example: Page 73: "Spend the time you need to ensure that you understand transformations. It is not an overly complex topic, but it can be challenging for beginner graphics programmers who do not give transformations the learning time the topic deserves."
So if you keep a self learning mentality, you should find this book VERY VERY VERY VERY HELPFUL, I would recommend it to any who does not know a thing about programming 3D, but has a pretty decent knowledge of physics, math(calculus), and 2D programming skills. This is what is going to boost me to the top. ;)
-------------------------------Update-----------------------------------
So its been a while, and i am just finishing up Chapter 17 "Ballistics." This is still an excellent book. I only have one beef with the book, and that is, it has awesome explanations of matrices and such, but when doing the camera tutorial, the auther assumes you have fully mastered matrices, and understand all. With that said, it still deserves the rating it received. This is a beginners book, and should be treated as one.
My advice would be to buy this book if you do not understand anything about 3D programming. This could be the start that helps you become a Game programmer, rather than just a hobbyist. (as in someone who can make a cube move around the screen).
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