Nick Gravelyn

I’ll be honest. As an XNA MVP and, more generally, a guy who spends a lot of time writing code, I generally pass up most XNA books I see. Sure it’d be nice to review them so I can recommend them (or not) to people, but it gets really hard to read through some of these books when I already know the contents. That’s why I was extremely pleased to get a copy of Building XNA 2.0 Games, by James Silva and John Sedlak.

This book did exactly what I was hoping: showed me how to build some editors and make a game. They didn’t spend chapters explaining how to use SpriteBatch or what a ‘class’ is. They give you a brief introduction and throw you head-first into the world of making a game.

The book does a couple of things very well. First is the entertainment value. The authors clearly worked hard to make the book an entertaining read. This helped immensely with my desire (or lack thereof) to keep reading. For instance, let’s take a glance at one such passage (from page 71):

We’ll start the dragging from DrawMapSegments(). This is typically a tremendous taboo, as we don’t want to put update logic in a drawing function, but we think as long as we acknowledge that it’s a bad practice, we’re nearly making up for doing it.

That also transitions into the next thing I think the book does well. The authors write the code to make the game work. Do they use improper C# techniques at time? Yep. Do they use some things that are considered less-than-stellar or somewhat taboo? Yep. But at the end of the book, they have a fully-functioning, nice looking game. And that’s what matters. Your end users aren’t going to be looking at your code, so who cares what it looks like as long as it does the job.

I’d say if you are getting comfortable with XNA and C#, this is the perfect book to get you from tech demoes to a finished game. This is not an introduction to XNA or C#. If you are looking for a book to do that, you’ll want to look elsewhere. That isn’t what this book does (and isn’t what it ever tried to do). So if you’re ready to make the next big hit using XNA Game Studio, give this book a read.