XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example – Visual Basic Edition – Review
XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example – Visual Basic Edition – Review
Author: Kurt Jaegers
Publisher: Packt
ISBN: ISBN
978-1-84969-240-3
Pages: 405
XNA originally required the novice programmer to learn a few new concepts all at the same time the XNA Framework, .Net, C# together with many programming and maths concepts required in created 2D and 3D games. Jumping directly into C# itself was a tall order especially when one already learns other languages at school / college such as Visual Basic (VB). This is possibly why the most requested feature for XNA was to enable support for Visual Basic.
This book does not dwell on the pros or cons of C# v VB for development, and assumes that the reader has already made this choice, otherwise why read the book. It is for each novice programmer to decide which programming language is more suited to them and if undecided it may make sense to use this book orientated to VB and compare it with its sister book XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example, orientated to C#. They use the same sample programs and are so a good way to determine which is easier to learn for each individual.
As a novice programmer the first thing you should do is download the complimentary source code that is available from the publisher’s web site. This book is not a typing tutorial and so it is always better to load the code for each sample.
As I was already familiar with the actual example programs I skipped through most of their detail, and concentrated mainly on the differences between C# and VB, mainly to fill in my own knowledge of what had occurred in VB since my last venture with VB6.
I continue to like the books editing style with detailed explanations of each step with regular sections of ‘What just happened?’ . This makes it easy to distinguish the stepped explanations from the general content for each chapter.
I must again highlight the excellent explanations for path finding using the A* algorithm. This topic is essential for every game programmer eventually.
Having read the book it failed to convert me from C# to VB, but that was not its objective.
If you are a novice programmer and still undecided whether to follow the C# or VB route what better way than to acquire both the VB and the C# version of this book can decide for yourself which language suits your existing knowledge.
