XNA Essentials

I am in talks with the publisher about the upcoming book Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0 Unleashed.  The original Microsoft XNA Unleashed book which covered XNA Game Studio Express has been successful and has received many good reviews and has been recommended on the XNA forums many times.  Of course, with a technical editor like Shawn Hargreaves, it is to be expected.

Since there is only a year between XNA Game Studio 2.0 and XNA Game Studio 3.0 we decided to not create a 2.0 specific book.  I was going to create 4 new chapters for networking, but those will just be added to the 3.0 book.  Since the decision was made to not update the book to 2.0, I upgraded the code included in the book to 2.0 and released it yesterday.

Besides networking chapters, the new 3.0 book will also include information on creating 2D games for the Zune.  It will include features that are specific to that hardware device as well.  The book will also include information on distributing games on the Xbox 360 through the Xbox LIVE Community Games service.

All of the items that made the first book a success will be included: Performance Considerations, Physics, AI, Game State Management, Particle Systems, 2D Demos, 2D Parallax Side Scroller Game, 3D Demos, Extending the Content Pipeline (including the new parameters introduced in 2.0), and a complete 3D game.

There is a lot of information coming, so if you have bought the original book and are looking to learn some of the topics mentioned above it may be worth getting it now.  Otherwise, just sit tight and the 3.0 book should be released shortly after Microsoft releases the product (around Holiday 2008).  So it could be as early as a couple weeks after the launch, but could be a long as two months after the launch.  We can all hope for the former.

As always, if there are any questions with the current Microsoft XNA Unleashed book, please ask a question in the book's forum on amazon.com.

Happy Coding!

-Chad