Microsoft Xna Unleashed: Graphics and Game Programming for Xbox 360 and Windows [With CDROM]

by Chad Carter

Foreword by Tom Miller Developer, XNA Game Studio Express, Microsoft Corporation Microsoft XNA Unleashed provides comprehensive coverage and solid instruction on how to leverage the XNA Framework to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0672329646
• ISBN13: 9780672329647
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Sams Publishing
• Length: 524 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Wow! Excellent Book ... Even for 2.0!

At first I was hesitant to get this book since it based on the 1.0 refresh. However, I wanted to get started right away and seeing how this technology will simply continue to grow, there is no better time than the present to start learning. I have all of the current XNA Books available and this one is by far the best. I love this guy's coding style ... it is nice when an author using .NET is actually using .NET styled code. If there is only one XNA book you can buy -- get this one. I really enjoyed his perspective on performance. It helped me in my day job as well ... can you say Garbage Collector? I bought this book to do 3D and I have been happy with my results. I am using 2D to supplement my 3D game, but it seems the community is obsessed with 2D games at this point. The physics chapter is great. I also enjoyed the chapter on Artificial Intelligence. Both are short, but to the point and helped me know where I need to look for more information. The particle system is excellent. I liked the force field created by particles ... cool. I am a programmer by trade and have dabbled in computer graphics in the past, but it was just too much work to get anything valuable. With XNA and this book as a guide, I was able to go so much farther than I ever did with DirectX and the books I bought on that subject. I have created a full 3D game that I plan to put out on Xbox LIVE Community Games when it is available. There is no way I would have a completed game without this book -- sound, game states, input, polish -- it is all in here! I liked how the author didn't waste time on rendering a single triangle ... he did a rectangle (two triangles) ... and then later used that code to create a skybox. The chapter on the content pipeline was excellent. I enjoyed the advanced topics he has as well like Render Targets, Parallax and Relief Mapping. In regards to changes with 2.0, he has updated the code on his site and it runs with no issues at all! Fortunately, the code is about identical to what it is in the book even with new code. I guess it just proves that not too much had to change between 1.0 refresh and 2.0. I would buy this book again. In fact, I will when the author comes out with the 3.0 book. Get this book ... and don't waste any more time ... make a great game -- it really is within grasp!

Wrote my first game in four days

This book was a recommended text for my graduate-level game architecture class. Like all good students, I left my assignment to "write an educational children's game" until the last moment, and found myself with five days to get myself up to speed on XNA -- starting from square one. Thankfully I'd had some C# experience, but when I sat down on Friday night with only this book and my laptop, I knew nothing about how to install or use XNA. After a solid weekend's work, I had an interactive fish tank simulator (ecosystems are educational, right?) complete with sounds and animation. There were enough examples in the book to get me started in all the directions I need to go: animating and scaling a sprite, collision detection, creating a sound bank... Plugging the appropriate code samples together was quite painless. I did have some trouble running the example code from the book, probably because I was running the relatively new XNA Game Studio 2.0, while the examples were written under the previous version. Nothing some Googling and debugging couldn't work around, however. Be sure to explicitly follow the instructions (either in the book or on the XNA download site) for installing Visual Studio, .Net, DirectX, and XNA Game Studio. You need precisely the right versions in precisely the right order or you'll be tearing your hair out. The CD that comes with the book contains only the example code - none of the Microsoft products above are included - so if you're on a slow Internet connection, you'd better start downloading now. Overall, this book is highly recommended for folks who want (or need) to get rolling with XNA quickly.

Excellent. How about another one for XNA 2.0?

I enjoy reading the book (almost done). Stuff related to performance is really helpful, not for just XNA programming. One thing I'd love to see is another book from this author (second edition?) - covering XNA 2.0 and adding a few more features to existing tutorials (sample games) in this book. Recommended.

Excellent examples

Each chapter has several code examples illustrating basic concepts and developing simple games. They all work which makes this book a pleasure to use. Code is available on a CD included with the book. The text is clearly written showing how to use XNA(TM) Game Studio to develop either 2D or 3D games. It would be impossible to go into depth on all the background graphics and mathematics that one would need if not using XNA. The book rightly focuses on XNA methods which do most of the work. More information can easily be found online to supplement the text which might be helpful to those new to game programming. The author starts with performance and integrates performance measuring into the code. He covers both Windows and the Xbox 360 with each project set up for both. The advanced topics are really useful for 3D games. In all it is very enjoyable to use.

Very Very Nice

I own pretty much all of the XNA titles that are currently available and I must say Chad's book is by far the easiest and nicest to read. The author is great at explaining a topic then putting it into source code.. which in my opinion is important with this difficult subject. Very nice book and I hope the author will write a more advanced follow up :) Perhaps a book on writing a complete game with the XNA Framework 2.0 due to be released in winter? 5/5 from me