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What our customer's say!

"good but", 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.

"A frustrating experience", As others have said, this book is exceptionally frustrating. Flipping through the book, it looks like there are tons of code examples - which is great! Then, you sit down with the book, expecting to be able to type along with the examples from scratch, and find out you can't. Everything from typos (second chapter there are a few flip flops of a variable confusingly named GameLifes being called the more obvious GameLives), to variables being used but never defined. Huge chunks use variables that aren't mentioned until several paragraphs later, in a paragraph basically starting with, "By the way, you need the following variables to get the preceding code to compile." Thanks! That's not confusing or anything!

The kicker was when I got to the first big chunk of input handling code for the Pong game. Apparently the author felt the chunk was too long, and it literally ends with a // ...etc - and doesn't finish! He tells you to look at the sample code which you can download! No! I don't want to copy/paste your sample code, I need to learn by doing, not by copying and pasting.

When I did look at the sample code, I found that it was completely different from the code in the book; lines were there that weren't in the book (this.IsFixedTimeStep = false in the constructor of your PongGame, which magically made my initial program not take 100% of my CPU for some reason). The input handling code for the Pong game which is written in one chunk (one unfinished chunk) in the book is actually broken into multiple functions in the sample code.

Clearly the author knows the subject matter, but I don't feel he has a grasp on how to teach others.

"Good book but not for beginners", When I first started this book I was completely new to programming and had a horrible time trying to follow along. Since then I have taken a class teaching Java which is very similar to C# and I have a much easier time with the book. The author does not write down all the necessary code in the book which is disappointing but if you have some experience coding, especially in c# or java, then you will be able to figure out what is missing fairly easily and be able to find it in the source code. The best way to go about reading this book is to read what he says, look at the code he wants you to write, find that code in the source code, then write the code yourself in the same location as you found it in the source code. I am still only about 3/4 of the way through chapter 2 so I can't really comment much on how much he focuses on xna but he does use a lot of unit tests. I find the book fairly helpful overall and I find it better than using similar tutorials online because most of the tutorials I found online are just straight code without any explanation of what it means or what order it should be written in. I recommend this book if you have some experience programming and prefer to learn by diving right into making games rather than reading a bunch.

"Awful book!", I agree with all the other dissatisfied buyers of this book. I have had this book 1 day and will either pray I can resell it or just plan give it away. I am on chapter 2 and can't even get it the Pong game going because more than 50% of the code needs to be downloaded. The writing style is all about the authors practices in game development and not the XNA technology. He does not teach you the XNA Development platform but rather how to right unit test and about 25% game development. I agree he is probably and outstanding game programmer and should stick to that. Very, Very bad buy and I have read alot of programming books in my day and have to say this is the Number 1 worse. Pllleeeaaase I beg that you save your money and buy a different book and don't set yourself back $40.

"Already Returning This Book", I've spent a couple hours with this book and I'm already decided to return it. I am just a step above "beginnger" when it comes to coding and I realize just enough that this book is completely outdated. The published date says Feb 26, 2008 which is exactly two months ago, however, version 2.0 of the Game Studio Express is fully out in the public and there are TONS of differences between it and what is presented in this book; so much so that it is actually confusing me to read this book INSTEAD of learning something.

Furthermore, a big reason I purchased this book was to read more about the Dungeon Quest game mentioned in the book. The author makes it sounds like this will be a fairly fleshed out example game by the time the book is released. However, what I find online is merely the example that was created in his 4 day GDC stent and nothing more. To make things worse, I cannot get it to compile in v2.0 of Game Studio Express.

Sorry.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"For an XNA book it doesn't focus much on XNA", While not a terrible book when it comes to game programming, if you were hoping for an in-depth look into the XNA SDK this is not the book for you. The author spend a lot of time focusing on his own helper classes and talking about how to test code. The author does have several projects to work through which are explained pretty well, and are probably one of the best points of this book. However you end up learning less about XNA and more about how to use his helper classes.

"A great book for anyone who doesn't need it.", The author of this book does not explain his code at all. He spends lots of time telling you about how wonderful he is at coding and how the agile coding method is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but when it comes to actually teaching you anything, he is more interested in showing off. While I could muddle through the first chapter and a half, after that it just got to the point where it was no longer worth the effort, and may not have been feasible to finish the projects. He did not provide the resource files for the projects, he does not explain anything he's doing...it's just bad. The only way you'll be able to follow this book is if you already know everything that he's 'teaching', and then what is the point of having the book?

"Painful Read - Returned It", I found this book very difficult to read. It wasn't the level of the technical information but sentences that are just horribly written. It felt more like a transcription of somebody's poorly though out presentation. I ended up returning it and buying another XNA book (by Joseph Hall)


"OK for the first book on XNA", I only made to about Chapter 8 on this book, I got sidetracked and needed more specific info.

At first I wasn't a fan of the test driven development style used in the book, but as I read through I realized it was just Ben's style of implementing everything as a delegate that I didn't really care for. I think his approach is a nice mix of "build a game from a book" and Frank Luna's approach of "single concept" examples, although I think the "single concept" approach is still more clear.

My biggest complaint is that there is almost no attention paid to collision detection. This is a complaint I have with almost all 3D game development books. Authors seem to want to gloss over it, most likely, because they don't really understand it. There are other full texts out there showing you how to do collision, but it would be nice for once for someone to write a book on game development and include some decent source and maybe a chapter or two towards the subject.

"Some neat stuff, but a flawed book overall", I got this book with high hopes, but found it to be lacking. If you want to follow what is written in the book directly you won't even be able to compile the first lesson! A large chunk of code is missing and the project will not compile without it being added (the keyboard.IsKeyDown bit will give you an error)! No CD is included, but if you go download the source from the website you can fill in the missing holes and follow along a bit, but I don't think many people buy programming books for large chunks of unexplained code. It just gets worse from there.

The emphasis on unit tests is also frustrating considering the book is billed as focusing on XNA programming.

That said, the book contains some useful info for a new game programmer, however I could not recommend it as a solid book on the subject.