Xna 4.0 Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide - Visual Basic Edition Review

The book is aimed towards beginners starting out in game programming. Visual basic is one of the easier languages to get started in, and XNA is a well known game framework, so it is an excellent place for beginners to start.

The book starts out with an introduction to XNA, and how to set it up on your machine for development. The author explains everything he adds to the code, which makes it easy to understand what each addition does.

The first game is created in chapter 2, so the author quickly gets into actually creating games fairly quickly, while introducing important concepts such as sprite sheets and tile based games.

The  following games continue to introduce important concepts, from collision detection to the A* pathfinding algorithm, and even using a map editor to make levels for a side scrolling mario-esque game!

I would definitely recommend this book to beginner and intermediate game programmers. The amount of important concepts introduced in this book would give you a great start to developing more advanced games in the future, and the concepts will still be useful for any 3d games. It doesn’t matter so much what language you start out programming, just learning the game programming concepts will get you started regardless of what language you eventually choose to develop in.

You can pickup the book here:
http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-xna-4-0-game-development-by-example-beginners-guide/book