Author: Rob Miles 

Website to Order: Microsoft Press Shop

(http://www.mspress.com.au/)

Rating: 

Now this is an awesome book. I could do the whole Kung Fu Panda bit and say it was a legendary book written by a legendary writer who makes legendary code seem legendary! And easy to follow, but I think that would be over doing it a bit.

So what makes the book so legendary (Couldn’t help myself :) )? It has to be in the way the author communicates the idea behind each section, speaking of which, there are 16 such sections.

• Getting Started
  1. Computers, C#, XNA and You
  2. Programs, Data and Pretty Colors
  3. Getting Player Input
• Images, Sound, and Text
  1. Displaying Images
  2. Writing Text
  3. Creating a Multi-player Game
  4. Playing Sounds
  5. Creating a Timer
  6. Reading Text Input
• Writing Proper Games
  1. Using C# Methods to Solve Problems
  2. A Game as a C# Program
  3. Games, Objects and State
  4. Making a Complete Game
  5. Classes, Objects and Games
  6. Creating Game Components
  7. Creating Multi-Player Networked Games

The introduction of the book is aimed at those who haven’t a clue where to start, the reader knows they want to create a game, they just don’t know how.  A major advantage of this book is that it covers PC, Xbox 360 and Zune coding. Yep, Zune. Admittedly the Zune isn’t available here in Australia……..yet!!! But there where reports during Tech Ed that is was going to happen, I can only hope as I refuse to buy any Apple product, Apple’s marketing campaign annoys the beejebus outta me.

Back to topic; Probably the best is that when you’re reading the book, and you have access to a pc with Visual Studio (www.dreamspark.com) on it, you are always playing and experimentating with the code. Be it something as simple as changing the background colour, to pushing images and accepting user input.  Refactoring code is also introduced so when you are building the mini games in the book, you are learning important concepts on how to maintain tidy code, discussions on commenting, the introduction of classes and methods. The ‘Great Programmer’ snippets throughout the book are fantastic reminders as to why you should always think and structure your code properly, include into your building processes testing for each and every possible action. It’s little tid bits of knowledge that take the book from a great book to a fantastic book. After all, how many times can you say that you are looking forward to re-reading a book on coding?

The authors companion site (http://verysillygames.com/) supports the book extremely well, leading off to other online curriculum material to ensure that you can learn C# and .Net.

So do I recommend this book for you to read, did you not just read the rest of this post? Of course you should get it, the humour and interaction that is found in the book makes for a very entertaining read, which is always good when you are trying to learn how to code in a computer language. So stop wasting time, head off to the www.mspress.com.au website, find and order the book, You’ll enjoy the book and if you have entered the Imagine Cup (www.imaginecup.com) it will give a great head start on getting into the competition.

Go, buy and enjoy!