I've been eyeing the Xbox 360 for a while, and when the price drop happened a month or two back, i was finally able to justify buying one. The first thing i did (after putting about 100 hours into Oblivion) was to start messing with XNA. For those who don't know, XNA is a game creation studio written by Microsoft and based on C#. The software is free and lets you make games for Windows. The thing that really makes XNA cool is that if you're willing to spend $100, you can get a license that allows you to write little Xbox games that can be sold in the Xbox Live Marketplace.

Having a small amount of game development experience, i decided that $100 was well worth the price (particularly since the professional development kit costs several thousand dollars). Of course, learning a new programming language requires that i have some sort of lanuage reference material. Microsoft has some documentation up on their site, but i personally am a fan of having an actual book to flip thru. Since i've been very happy with O'Reilly books i've purchased in the past, i immediately snagged myself a copy of their XNA book.

Imagine my disappointment when i received the book and realized that it seems to be aimed at high kids who know nothing about programming or development, but think they might want to pursue a career in the video game industry. The entire book is extremely basic. It doesn't even touch any intermediate or advanced topics. Most of the content is based on copying code out of the book with little or no explanation of why that code functions the way it does. The book is essentially worthless to me.

If that was disappointing, imagine my further disappointment when i started looking into getting an XNA book from another publisher and realized that O'Reilly's seems to be the best one on the market. All the other books seem to follow a nearly identical course of teaching. It reminds me quite a bit of the computer programming class i took in high school. But that's another blog.

None of them have what i really want: a simple language reference. All their chapters about making enemies move or keeping score are nice, but they don't really come in handy if you're in the middle of creating something and you've forgotten the syntax for the CreateFromBoundingBox method. Coincidentally, why does every one of these books seem to dedicate a full chapter to keeping score, and it's usually either the last chapter in the 2D section or the last chapter in the book? Since keeping score in a game is just a matter of tracking and displaying a numeric variable, it's something that readers should have figured out long before reaching that chapter. Not only is keeping score so incredibly simple, but scores are becoming increasingly irrelevant in modern game design.

Anyway, the point is this: Does anyone know of any XNA books that actually have practical usability?