XNA is an application framework provided by Microsoft. It integrates into their Visual Studio applications, and lets you, the user, create video games playable on the Windows PC, Xbox 360, and Windows 7 Phone using any .NET-compatible programming language.

Aaron Reed, a professor of computer science with a penchant for video game design, has provided us a wonderful addition to O’Reilly’s “Learning...” series. However, I must note that this book is most definitely not a good place to start if you don’t already understand C#. While you could, theoretically, write XNA games in Visual Basic, or C++, or, if you’ve acquired third-party plugins, Java or even Perl, Reed’s examples are entirely in C#. Because of that, if you’re not already familiar with that language, I’d recommend picking up and working through O’Reilly’s Learning C# prior to working on this book if you’d like to maximize your learning opportunities.

While I had some issues with the code examples (for example, a lot of retyping instead of writing generalized functions to do the same thing with fewer lines of code), I understood that his code was probably like that to not get the Learner of XNA to not be encumbered by better coding standards that would likely confuse more than educate.

He covered a lot of excellent topics, including the basics for 2D and 3D (that is, polygons, not two simultaneous images) games, as well as covering the differences between programming for Windows, Xbox, and Windows 7 Phone (It’s advisable to have Windows 7 on your PC, otherwise you can’t get the Phone libraries). He also covered multiplayer gaming, both using split-screen functionality and using the XNA networking library and the Windows Live system (however, when I tried to create an Xbox profile for my Windows Live account, the system was down).

What I would have liked to see, however, were more topics, such as making save states, turn-based games, and perhaps even networking without using the Windows Live stuff. And, of course, I’d love to see a Programming XNA 4.0 book in the near future, covering all the wonderful things one could do with XNA in a telephone directory of delight. The lack of these features, however, does not make the book worth reading. Any additional topics could probably be easily learned after reading this book by Googling “xna topic here”.

I highly recommend this book if you have any interest in video game design. ( )