XNA Game Studio 4.0 for Xbox 360 Developers Review

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XNA Game Studio 4.0 for Xbox 360 Developers ReviewThis is an ADVANCED book for EXPERIENCED developers, and not intended for a beginner or a first course on XNA 4.0 programming. The publisher's error in posting an incorrect table of contents during the pre-order period leading up to the book's release is not reason enough to give this book a 1-star review, so I'm countering that with actually useful information about the book.
Key points at a glance:
Discover how to create exciting and challenging games for the Xbox 360 using XNA Game Studio 4.0 and the Visual C# programming language.
Provides experienced game developers with a comprehensive overview of the XNA Framework, providing all the tools, source code, and information you need to develop Windows and Xbox 360 games.
An introduction to programming in XNA, the XNA Framework, and all the new features included in XNA 4.0.
The bulk of the book focuses on the XNA Framework, in particular the features of the Xbox 360, including the controller, playing audio, and creating graphics.
Covers the major features of Xbox Live, including creating and rendering an avatar, loading and rendering a 3D mesh using a basic shader, and networking via system link and online.
A final game project demonstrates the networking capabilities of XNA and acts as a rudimentary, sprite-based networked game engine for your own projects.
Source code and artwork from the book as well as Visual C# 2010 projects for Windows and Xbox 360 are available as accompanying downloads.
Table of contents:
Part 1: Introduction and Primer
1. Introduction to XNA Game Studio 4.0
2. Peeking Under the Hood
Part 2: XNA Framework Library
3. XNA Framework Overview
4. Audio
5. Content
6. GamerServices
7. Graphics
8. Input
9. Media
10. Net
11. Storage
Part 3: Xbox Live
12. Avatars
13. Guide
14. Multi-player Networking
15. Meshes
16. Sprites
17. Multi-player Game Engine
XNA Game Studio 4.0 for Xbox 360 Developers OverviewDiscover how to create exciting and challenging games for the Xbox 360 using XNA Game Studio 4.0 and the Visual C# programming language. XNA Game Studio 4.0 for Xbox 360 Developers provides experienced game developers with a comprehensive overview of the XNA Framework, providing all the tools, source code, and information you need to develop Windows and Xbox 360 games. You'll find an introduction to programming in XNA, the XNA Framework, and all the new features included in XNA 4.0 to get you started. The bulk of the book focuses on the XNA Framework, in particular the features of the Xbox 360, including the controller, playing audio, and creating graphics. The final part of the book covers the major features of Xbox Live, including creating and rendering an avatar, 3D programming, loading and rendering a mesh using a basic shader, and networking via system link and online. You'll tie together all the skills you've learned in a final game project that demonstrates the networking capabilities of XNA and acts as a rudimentary, sprite-based networked game engine for your own projects. Source code and artwork from the book as well as Visual C# 2010 projects for Windows and Xbox 360 are available as accompanying downloads.

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Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology Review

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Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology ReviewCREATING GAMES provides avid gamers with an outstanding survey of the technology of games and is directed to computer game professionals seeking an overview of the technology, content and mechanics of game design. From comprehension tests with problems to help readers learn to resources for specialized game development, this offers a focus on the content and mechanics of game creation. Serious game programmers at advanced levels need this.Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology OverviewThis book is a comprehensive overview of the technology and mechanisms of game design. It emphasizes the broad view of a game team and teaches you enough about your teammates area so that you can work effectively with them. It includes many worksheets and exercises to help get your small indie team off the ground. By the end of the book, you'll have a game.

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Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development Review

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Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development ReviewBeginning Windows Phone 7 Development by Lee and Chuvyrov is aimed at developers new to the Windows Phone 7 platform (which is probably most of us). This book expects a basic understanding of C#, the .NET Framework and XAML so if you have no prior programming experience, an introductory text is a pre-requisite. .NET developers without Silverlight or WPF experience shouldn't find the content too challenging as it is either explained sufficiently by the authors or fairly easy to grasp in its own right.
Part 1, The Essentials of Windows Phone 7 Application Development, starts with a high level introduction to the Windows Phone 7 platform and then drills into some examples ranging from the obligatory Hello World through to a thorough Windows Azure-based cloud services end-to-end scenario. There are plenty of step-by-step instructions and loads of screenshots in these five introductory chapters making them a easy read.
Part 2, Using Windows Phone 7 Technologies, comprises the remaining fourteen chapters and the vast majority of the book. The meat of the book is in these chapters and provides a reasonable grounding for developers looking to discover the breadth of the Windows Phone 7 platform without getting bogged down in too much detail.
The book is organised reasonably well and covers the material well enough for someone new to the platform to become productive relatively quickly. The tone of the book is light without trying too hard to be humourous, which I was thankful for. However, I have two complaints to make, resulting in a less than perfect score.
First, there are a number of inconsistencies in the example code printed in the book. For example, in Chapter 2, the book refers to a TextBlock called textBlock1 in the description of the subsequent code but then goes on to use a TextBox called txtMessage in the actual code listing. There are plenty of similar errors in this section. Its easy enough to understand where the book has gone wrong and correct for it but it may be frustrating for beginners.
Secondly, and far more annoying for me, was the volume of grammatical errors. The authors' command of English is obviously good but between the frequent errors, odd turns of phrase, and some repetitive wording, I found the writing to be a distraction (there's something about code being referred to as codes that really irritates me). Thankfully I perservered through to Part 2 of the book where either the writing improved or I became too desensitised to care anymore.
The book is fine as a survey of the important areas of Windows Phone 7 which will likely require your attention as a developer. If you don't mind the occasional superficial inconsistencies in code examples or if the quality of the writing doesn't get in your way, you could do far worse. Some work by the editors at Apress should result in a much improved second edition as it really only needs polishing rather than a rewrite.
Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development Overview
Microsoft'sWindows Phone 7 handsets have injected a new vibrancy into the smartphone marketplace and provided bold new opportunities for the Microsoft development community. Now in its second edition, Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development has been written to help you identify those opportunities and to learn the skills you'll need to harness them. It covers the very latest developments in the field, including the extended APIs offered in Microsoft's automatic platform update, so you'll have timely, accurate information at your fingertips. Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development, Second Edition starts with the basics, walking you through the process of downloading and setting up the right development tools, including Visual Studio, Expression Blend, Silverlight SDK, and Windows Phone SDK. It then takes you step-by-step though the development process as you build and deploy a working application, complete with a sophisticated user interface. Finally, you'll receive step-by-step instructions on selling your applications through the Windows Phone Marketplace.

What you'll learn
How to create effective networked applications
How to leverage your phone's GPS capabilities from within your application
How to interact with the phone's built-in functionalities (camera, contacts, maps, accelerometer, video and web browser to name but a few)
How to construct highly graphical and responsive user interfaces quickly and easily using these features
How to package and distribute your applications for bothpersonal distribution and commercial sale via the Windows Phone Marketplace

Who this book is for
This book is for anyone interested in developing applications for the Windows Phone 7. You might be an existing .NET developer looking for a new creative angle, or perhaps an iPhone or Android developer looking for a new opportunity. If you have an understanding of basic .NET coding practices, then this book is for you.

Table of Contents
Introducing Windows Phone 7 and the Windows Phone Platform
Building Windows Phone 7 Applications
Using Cloud Services As Data Stores
Catching and Debugging Errors
Packaging, Publishing, and Managing Applications
Working with the Accelerometer
Application Bar
WebBrowser Control
Working with Controls and Themes
Integrating Applications with the Windows Phone OS
Creating Trial Applications
Internationalization
Isolated Storage
Using Location Services
Media
Working with the Camera and Photos
Push Notifications
Reactive Extensions for .NET
Security


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Game Engine Gems, Volume One Review

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Game Engine Gems, Volume One ReviewWhen one buys a "gem" series book, it is to learn specific, useful techniques for implementing systems and algorithms. The "gems" themselves are the sought-after ideas and theories, formed into concrete examples that can be applied to ones needs.
Unfortunately, this book does not live up to its "gems" titling, only serving to dilute that designation with weak content. Many of the chapters read as if they were written by high school students that attended a seminar on "game engine issues" and were forced to write a paper to prove they paid attention. In other words, the chapters will talk about how you would go about doing something and what would be desired in the final product, rather than describing how it is actually done. As such, many of the chapters are extremely short, some as short as 2-3 pages, and have sparse generalization information in them--hardly "gems."
This book should be retitled, and directed towards people who want to read about general issues and ideas in game engines. It's not a "gem" book by any means, and you're not going to glean any sophisticated techniques from the authors. I also have to wonder about that "5 star" first review given to this book, whether it was a shill review, because I can't expect any professional keeping this book on hand, let alone as a reference. I wish I had spent more time looking at the "Look Inside" preview before laying my money down for this mediocre book.Game Engine Gems, Volume One OverviewGame Engine Gems brings together in a single volume dozens of new articles from leading professionals in the game development industry. Each gem presents a previously unpublished technique related to game engines and real-time virtual simulations. Specific topics include rendering techniques, shaders, scene organization, visibility determination, collision detection, audio, user interface, input devices, memory management, artificial intelligence, resource organization, and cross-platform considerations. A CD-ROM containing all the source codes and demos accompanies the book.

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Real-World Flash Game Development: How to Follow Best Practices AND Keep Your Sanity Review

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Real-World Flash Game Development: How to Follow Best Practices AND Keep Your Sanity ReviewYou should have some Actionscript 3.0 experience before you dig into this book. The user level on the back of the book says intermediate to advanced and they mean it! You will also need CS4 to be able to open the downloadable files. I could not open them on my CS3 machine.
This book covers a lot of topics I have not found in other AS books. Some examples are event propagation, dispatching events, E4X, getter/setter methods and protected variables. The chapters are very intense and delve more deeply into the workings of AS 3.0. If you want to know how and why Actionscript does what it does this is the book for you.
Real World also directs you to adopt best practices. This should keep you from developing bad habits and allow you to author modular code that could be easily modified.
The final game in the book is a platform game. You can learn how to load external SWFs containing the game's assets at runtime. This concept is very different from other game tutorials I have worked with.
I would recommend Actionscipt 3.0 Game Programming University if you haven't done any game programming. It has a much gentler approach to game programming.
Real World Flash Game Development should be an important addition to every game developer's bookshelf.Real-World Flash Game Development: How to Follow Best Practices AND Keep Your Sanity OverviewThis book covers Flash for the everyday developer. The average Flash developer doesn't have luxurious timelines, employers who understand the value of reusability, or the help of an information architect to design a usable experience. This book helps bridge the gap for these coders who may be used to C++, Java, or C# and want to move over to Flash. Griffith covers real-world scenarios pulled from his own experiences developing games for over 8 years in the industry. Gifts from Griffith's REAL-WORLD experiences include: Game design templates and pre-written scripts to automate tasks within Flash; Classes for handling common math computations used in gaming, so that game developers can see how to set up a simple game flow; Powerful debugging tools for your games(debuggers for Flash games are hard to come by, and this book provides them for you). The associated web site offers: Code from the game examples in the book with fully build-able source files. Additional code snippets, classes, and utilities. Scripts for automating tedious and repetitive tasks within Flash. Template game-design documents for planning game proposals in the same manner outlined in the book. Links to other helpful online resources for both Flash and game development.*Teaches Flash users the most effective ways to leverage Flash as a game development tool. Concrete, relatable approaches to Flash game development.* Provides sound strategies, and realistic goals for success - with REAL-WORLD examples and code included so that programmers become quickly empowered to make their own Flash games. *Covers ALL the aspects that come into play when developing a game in Flash, including art, animation, scripting, and optimization.

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Collada: Sailing the Gulf of 3d Digital Content Creation Review

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Collada: Sailing the Gulf of 3d Digital Content Creation ReviewI purchased this book at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 conference and finished it within a few days of my return. The text is clearly written and the endnotes are interesting. It clarifies many of the ambiguities in the COLLADA specification. This book is a must-have for anyone writing COLLADA import or export code.Collada: Sailing the Gulf of 3d Digital Content Creation OverviewCOLLADA is a COLLAborative Design Activity for establishing an open standard Digital Asset schema for interactive 3D applications. This book explains in detail how to use the COLLADA technology in a project utilizing 3D assets, and ultimately how to create an effective content creation pipeline for the most complex development. Errata are posted at http://collada.org/mediawiki/index.php/COLLADA_book.

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Game Development Tools Review

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Game Development Tools ReviewGame Development Tools deserves ongoing recommendation for any collection catering to professional game developers, and offers the latest research on tools development. It's the first in-depth coverage of game tools and offers guidelines, applications of tools, and assessments of third-party applications for game developers seeking specific, advanced insights. From building pipelines to GPU debugging using NVIDIA's Parallel Nsight, this packs in details to help game and graphics programmers create better games in less time.
Game Development Tools OverviewThis book brings the insights of game professionals, DCC creators, hardware vendors, and current researchers together into a collection that focuses on the most underrepresented and critical part of game production: tools development. The first gems-type book dedicated to game tools, this volume focuses on practical, implementable tools for game development professionals. Topics range from asset tracking to improving remote version control performance to robust and efficient IO. Technical artists, as well as game play, audio, and graphics programmers will find new tools to improve work flow and help build games faster.

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