XNA: Which single book should a beginner start with?

Question

I have tried searching for a similar post on SO, but apparently only found posts that suggest following online tutorials, and I'm ok with that.

But I'm big on reading, and prefer having a book in my hand, even for referential purposes.

Searching on amazon returns about 4 pages of books related to XNA Game Programming.

I am very new to game development and haven't touched XNA yet, so what I need is something that is targeted for a beginner in both XNA AND Game Programming in General.

So my question is, from your experience in XNA, what Single book do you recommend me to buy and start with?

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[UPDATE]

In this question I am asking for a single book that should be recommended to beginning XNA developers, and ironically enough, 4 different posters mentioned 5 different books heh...

Anyways, here is a list of books that have been mentioned up till now:

• Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0 Unleashed (2009)
• Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming (2009)
• Learning XNA 3.0 (2008)
• Professional XNA Game Programming (2008)
• Microsoft XNA Unleashed: Graphics and Game Programming for Xbox 360 and Windows (2007)
• XNA Game Studio Express: Developing Games for Windows and the Xbox 360 (2007)

Answer 1

Microsoft XNA Unleashed is pretty nice. It focuses on 3d a fair amount, but also dedicates a chapter to 2d design. It's an easy read, with lessons that build on themselves.

Answer 2

I found Learning XNA 3.0 and Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming to be fairly enjoyable to read. The second book I found documents things a little better for beginners. The first publishers I look for when buying books are O'Reilly and Apress, unless of course the Author(s) of the language/tool themself wrote a book, I would want to check that out too (for example, C# books from MS Press, The C Programming Language by K&R).

Answer 3

Assuming you're not also a beginner at coding in general, Benjamin Nitschke's book Professional XNA Game Programming is really excellent. He has a Test Driven Development approach to coding and reading this was actually something that helped make TDD make sense to me, in addition to providing a lot of information about XNA.

His blog is very good also, but perhaps even better is the library of samples available at XNAProjects.net, many of which are his. If you like his coding style from the book, then the wide variety of samples available help everything to sink in while maintaining a consistent style.

I particularly appreciated the fact that he spent the first few chapters on 2d stuff before jumping into the more complex 3d topics, as a lot of XNA books seem to.

Answer 4

the one by joe hall (4th on your search list) is the only one I've read - and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Joe is a friend of mine, one of the original XBox and Visual Studio programmers, and (obviously) an accomplished programmer - but he writes very well, especially for beginners so I can't help but recommend this book. Agnostic-apathetic about the rest of them (don't know - don't care)!

Answer 5

I've learnt everything from the XNA Creator's website and that alone, the site has a great collection of lessons and tutorials of which you should definitely work your way through, that's http://creators.xna.com

Answer 6

I have Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0 Unleashed, and have found it quite useful as a beginner. It has both 2D and 3D in it fairly equally, and uses a recent version of XNA. The author explains things in a very easy to understand way.

Answer 7

Ya know I really learned a lot from the following tutorial series, not knowing a thing about XNA before following and replicating his code:

http://www.riemers.net/

I was able to make a simple game in no time from the codebase I created while reading the tutorial.

The best part is that it isn't a book and it's completely free!