XNA 2.0 Game Programming Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

By Riemer Grootjans

XNA programming is an increasingly popular way of creating games for the Microsoft Xbox 360 home entertainment system, as well as Windows PCs. The free development tools distributed by Microsoft make it a platform that appeals to both the professional developer looking to create a commercial product and the home enthusiast wanting to put together games in their spare time.

This book is calculated to appeal to as wide a range of people as possible, whether they are complete beginners or already have coding experience in another area. It provides recipes to help people over the common hurdles that they experience when setting out to create both 2D and 3D applications with XNA. The book also offers helpful snippets of the HLSL coding language built into to XNA in order to help people bind their applications together seamlessly. This is an area that does not receive much coverage in most XNA books and will set this title apart.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 159059925X
• ISBN13: 9781590599259
• Release Date: July 2008
• Publisher: Apress
• Length: 648 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Ive used this great book to create my game

I have three books on XNA and Ive stopped reading the other two because this book is by faaaar the best! I am an XNA Creators Club premier member and Im creating a game single handedly for Xbox Live Arcade Community and I would never be able to do this without the help Ive received from this book. Ive used or will use his recipes for collision testing, menus, camera, and one from almost every chapter. XNA is difficult and reading his book has allowed me to break through and think in XNA. The recipes are concise and authoratative. I bet he worked hand in hand with Microsoft because his recipes are close to some of the downloadable samples on the XNA Creator Club site but a lot better because of his concise explanations. You would never know if English is his first language or not from reading this great book. If you are creating a game you need a lot of books so I would recommend you get this book and maybe a starter XNA book with an example of a full game delopment (which the Recipes book does not have) but definitely get this book!

Brilliant

I wasn't convinced by the "recipe-based" approach before I ordered this book, but I enjoyed the author's online tutorials so thought I would give it a shot. I ended up buying and reading what is, pure and simple the best XNA book currently on the market. Each "recipe" is direct and to the point with a minimum of fuss. Some are straightforward and can be skimmed over quickly, while others investigate the deepest corners of XNA and shine a light upon them. I've been writing games professionally for six years and there were recipes in this book that made me stop and say, "wow". I'm not convinced it would be a great purchase for beginners - the direct and succinct writing style may not provide enough detail for those who aren't used to creating basic games already. However, there are a plethora of other XNA books targeted at beginners - this one says, "so you know a little bit about XNA? Now let me show you the good stuff." If I had to pick up on anything, it would be that the book could have done with more diagrams. Sometimes the only way to actually see the results of a recipe, instead of just understanding it conceptually, is to copy out (or download) the example code. This is a minor quibble, because the explanations are clear and to the point, and more diagrams might have meant fewer recipes, which would have been a far bigger price to pay.

Book five stars

In this moment this is the best book in XNA. Thank you Mr. Riemer for your webside and this book.

Great book for both beginner and intermediate

I have followed Riemer's site pretty much as soon as he started publishing articles on XNA and loved all his on line tutorials as they gave a good base for those of us starting out and also enough for us to be getting on with once we got past those first early stages. I am pleased to say that the book is no different in this achievement, each Recipe has enough detail and information for you to pickup the techniques. I am also astounded as to how much is in here, from the basic data storage in XNA, on to cameras, game components, dealing with models and then onto the usage of vertices's, HLSL, the list goes on! Great site, great book.