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Benjamin Nitschke

Professional XNA Programming: Building Games for Xbox 360 and Windows with XNA Game Studio 2.0 Paperback – Bargain Price, February 26, 2008

by Benjamin Nitschke (Author)

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This improved and updated edition of the bestseller will get you up and running quickly with building games for Xbox 360 and the Windows platform. Professional game developer and Microsoft MVP Benjamin Nitschke begins by explaining how to install the free XNA Game Studio 2.0 and then goes on to share essential advice for using it in a productive way.

Before you know it, each successive chapter will have you developing small games that increase in difficulty. By using the chapters as building blocks, you'll evolve from 2D programming to 3D, and you'll ultimately create a full-blown graphics engine that can be used for more advanced game projects. Plus, you'll get an inside look at six fully functional games, including the popular Racing Game and the new Dungeon Quest.

What you will learn from this book

Tips for adding music and sound with XACT
Techniques for creating unique visual effects through Shaders
Ways to access keyboard, mouse, and Xbox controllers with XInput
How to write your own XNA graphics engine and create a game engine
How to manage content in XNA
Myriad ways of fine-tuning, debugging, and troubleshooting
How to make sure games run on the Xbox 360
Ways to generate landscapes and tracks
How to take advantage of XNA's new networking APIs

Who this book is for
This book is for anyone who wants to create games on the Xbox 360 and Windows platforms. Experience with C# or a similar .NET language is necessary, but previous game programming is not required.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

Print length

600 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Wrox
Publication date

February 26, 2008
Dimensions

7.4 x 1.25 x 9.2 inches
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Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

This improved and updated edition of the bestseller will get you up and running quickly with building games for Xbox 360 and the Windows platform. Professional game developer and Microsoft MVP Benjamin Nitschke begins by explaining how to install the free XNA Game Studio 2.0 and then goes on to share essential advice for using it in a productive way.

Before you know it, each successive chapter will have you developing small games that increase in difficulty. By using the chapters as building blocks, you'll evolve from 2D programming to 3D, and you'll ultimately create a full-blown graphics engine that can be used for more advanced game projects. Plus, you'll get an inside look at six fully functional games, including the popular Racing Game and the new Dungeon Quest.

What you will learn from this book

Tips for adding music and sound with XACT
Techniques for creating unique visual effects through Shaders
Ways to access keyboard, mouse, and Xbox controllers with XInput
How to write your own XNA graphics engine and create a game engine
How to manage content in XNA
Myriad ways of fine-tuning, debugging, and troubleshooting
How to make sure games run on the Xbox 360
Ways to generate landscapes and tracks
How to take advantage of XNA's new networking APIs

Who this book is for
This book is for anyone who wants to create games on the Xbox 360 and Windows platforms. Experience with C# or a similar .NET language is necessary, but previous game programming is not required.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

About the Author

Benjamin Nitschke is the founder, lead programmer, and game designer at exDream entertainment. He is 26 years old, and lives in Hannover, Germany. He became a DirectX MVP of Microsoft in 2006 for his outstanding work in the DirectX community, especially with the free game Rocket Commander.
He started young — at the age of 9 he bought his first computer, a C64. He did not have many games, but he was very eager to type in commands on the C64, and from that to writing the first applications and games in Basic was not a big step. A few years later, he finally got a PC (386) and started some small game projects (Tetris clones, shoot-em-up games, and so on). exDream entertainment was founded 10 years ago, and it released a couple of smaller games before the first RTS game, Arena Wars, was created. Arena Wars was the first commercial .NET game ever and was released in 2004, where it received more than 20 awards worldwide, especially for the great multiplayer modes.
Recently, Benjamin has developed a couple of free open source games such as Rocket Commander and the XNA Racing Game Starter Kit, along with many game modifications. These games feature many video tutorials and a good documentation and code style to help beginners create their first video games. The video tutorials have been viewed more than 100,000 times and the games were downloaded and played even more often than that.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B005GNMGDA
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wrox; 2nd edition (February 26, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 600 pages
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.4 x 1.25 x 9.2 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #17,956,173 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,661 in Game Programming
- #182,637 in Deals in Books

Customer Reviews:
46 ratings

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4 star		15%
3 star		43%
2 star		12%
1 star		10%

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The Professor

Disappointed with the book!

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2007

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As a professor I have been teaching XNA game development as part of our curriculum since January 2007 without the use of a textbook. Had high hopes for this book and the first pages were great! But as the book continued two problems appeared. The first major issue is the author's focus on "unit testing". This concept introduced so early in a book offering to teach beginners greatly complicated the learning process of XNA. Would have much clearer to teach XNA and then later in the book introduce another technology. The second issue is the use of advanced C# programming techniques into the code without explaining the reasoning. I have been programming for decades, been teaching programming for more than two decades, teaching C# since 2001 and even then some of the programming approaches had me looking in "help" explanations.

So I am still in search for a beginning textbook on XNA!!!!

Professor Terrance "Terry" Simkin
Program Coordinator Animation and Graphic Game Programming
Professor Computer Engineering Technology
New Hampshire Technical Institute

3 people found this helpful

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MikalC

Three Stars

Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2018

Verified Purchase

good

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T. Sanders

Excellent introduction to XNA

Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2007

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Professional XNA Game Programming is an excellent introduction to XNA. The book starts out with some 2D games (Pong, Breakout and Tetris clones) to teach the foundations of game programming and moves into 3D from there. Along the way, the differences between writing a game for Windows and the Xbox 360 are discussed and the author provides some debugging tips for the Xbox. Benjamin Nitschke's writing style is clear and easy to follow and he promotes good programming practices. Some of the code examples printed in the book aren't completely consistent with the text that discusses them, but downloading the code from the website resolves any problems.

2 people found this helpful

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Frederick Welsh

Probably a good book just not for beginners

Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2007

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I've only made it up through ch 2 and have decided that I will probably have to come back to this book after I get some more game programming experience. The introduction says that the reader should have knowledge of C# but experience with C++ or Java will suffice. I have "2nd semester" level experience in all of these languages and still have difficulty following the author. In the small bit that I read there were a number of times where the author does things like tells the reader to enter certain pieces of code but doesn't mention where to insert them nor is it obvious based soley on the context of the discussion. I also became frustrated when he said to drag some particular texture files into the IDE but didn't mention where they originate from. The book contains no CD and as it turns out he does in fact mention somewhere in the first chapter that all the files mentioned in the book are located on the publishers website. Still, it would have been nice if that point had been reiterated. Also, as this is a book targeted at professionals and not beginners don't expect many explanations about how some lines of code work. This is probably a good book if you're a game programmer with a couple of years experience and looking to add XNA to your repertoire. If you want to learn the basic nuts and bolts of game programming you may want to look elsewhere first. I'd recommend the book "Game Programming for Teens." Don't let the title mislead you, I'm 32 and learned lots! It doesn't go beyond 2D but it's very straight forward.

8 people found this helpful

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Brian R. Forquer

Not what I was looking for

Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2007

Verified Purchase

While not exactly the books fault it is not what I was looking for. I guess what I was looking for was something that explains not only XNA frame work but also some of the theory or practices of the programming side of game development. The book uses a lot of helper classes built by author. This is good if you wanted to see how people write helper classes but I was looking for more of an indepth view of XNA Framework and game development. If you are looking for a book that teaches the basics of game development using XNA I would not suggest this book. When I have a better understanding of XNA this book may get a second glance.

3 people found this helpful

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T. DOYLE

good but

Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2008

Verified Purchase

the only fault I found in this book in that it tells you to use sprites that you dont have. on the front of the book theres a web site were you can download source code, but no sprites. as for the rest of the book I found it to be very good for beginers, witch i am, I just had to make the sprites myself.

Helpful

Cecilia Marcano

You will need another XNA book

Reviewed in the United States on May 16, 2007

Verified Purchase

I just want to warn the reader before buying this book. Certainly the author knows how to code games, but this book did not worked for ME for the following reasons:

*) You will need to be in front of a computer and have the samples downloaded if you want to learn something. I read 200 pages from this book while traveling by plane and since most of the code is not printed, and the author relies on the reader to try things on the computer, I did not learned much. If you are like me and love to read books in the beach, on the bed, or waiting on the dentist, you will not learn much.

*) Some of the games were written with the beta version and then ported, and some with the release version, but none with the refresh version. So the information may be already outdated. For example, the author states that XNA does not support fonts, and that was true, but no anymore.

*) The book can not be used as a reference book, it was written to be read from the beginning to the end.

*) The games presented on the book relies on helper classes written by the author, so sometimes you feel more like learning how to use this helper classes and less like learning XNA.

I feel bad writing this because the author has contributed so much for the XNA community, he deserves better, but this book is just not for everyone. If you feel like sitting in front of the computer and analyze code to learn by yourself, I suggest trying the samples from the XNA site first.

41 people found this helpful

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Mr Reviewer

Tell me about XNA not Agile Project Management Methods

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 22, 2007

Verified Purchase

Pointless book where the author has used it as a soapbox to promote completely unrelated subjects like Agile project management. The text is error prone and hard to follow. Wait for a better book.

3 people found this helpful

Freebird

Für DirectX-Entwickler

Reviewed in Germany on July 4, 2007

Verified Purchase

Traditionsgemäß richten sich Bücher mit dem Titelzusatz "Professional" an bereits durchschnittlich erfahrene Leser, auch hier: Schon mit "Pong" führt Nitschke nebenbei noch Agile Methodology und Unittests mit Funktionszeigern ein: 886 Zeilen Code mit sieben überladenen RenderSprite-Methoden.

Zu welchen Klassen Codeschnipsel hinzugefügt werden sollen, ist oft unklar. Erst kurz vor Kapitelende folgt ein "By the way: You added all this code to". Mancher vorgestellte Methodenrumpf bleibt ungefüllt und der Leser muss unaufgefordert improvisieren. Die Kapitel liefern allenfalls Hinweise, auch werden nur einzelne Klassendiagramme bebildert, aber keine Frameworks. Wissen um Vererbung, Überladung und Polymorphie ist Voraussetzung für das Quelltextstudium (Download nötig) und wird nicht vermittelt.

Dieses Buch sollten Sie kaufen, wenn
...Sie bereits DirectX programmiert haben und auf XNA umsteigen wollen
...Sie OOP-Entwickler sind und XNA kennenlernen möchten
...Sie Pipelines, Shader, Engine Design, Landscapes und Physics in XNA verwirklicht sehen möchten
...Ihnen schon Brainstormings ausreichend Informationen liefern

Dieses Buch sollten Sie nicht kaufen, wenn Sie
...ein Lehrbuch oder Nachschlagewerk zu XNA erwarten
...schon immer wissen wollten, was Pipelines und Shader überhaupt sind
...gerne schrittweise und lückenlos durch ein Thema geführt werden

Fazit: Ein dickes Begleitbuch zu den offiziellen Tutorials "Rocket Commander", "XNA Shooter" und "Racing Game" mit vielen wertvollen Insider-Informationen über professionelle Spieleentwicklung. Wer ein didaktisch gut gegliedertes Lehrbuch zu XNA sucht, greift zu Stephen Cawood oder Chad Carter.

7 people found this helpful

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Professional XNA Programming: Building Games for Xbox 360 and Windows with XNA Game Studio 2.0 Paperback – Bargain Price, February 26, 2008

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