Beginning .NET Game Programming in VB .NET review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 18 Feb 2005

Price when reviewed:

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

ISBN 1590594010

PAGES 752

The sort of games this book teaches you to write are not of the 3D all-action sort to which you might have grown accustomed.

Instead it works its way through material that you may have encountered in the early days of the personal computer. This isn't surprising, as the team of authors - David Weller, Alexandre S Lobao and Ellen Hatton - all claim to be enthusiastic about the Space Invaders era of computing. All the examples are essentially 2D sprite-based games, but both the GDI+ and DirectX are also used.

So is this a bad book? Far from it. As long as you don't expect Quake or Doom, this is a fun way to learn how to program the .NET framework and about object-oriented programming in general. The examples are well described and interwoven with the text in a natural manner. The source code isn't included as a CD but it is available from the website.

This book is based on an earlier volume written in C#, but has revisions plus an extra chapter on writing games for the Pocket PC. The VB .NET version has the advantages of being more mature and containing fewer errors.

Both the C# and VB .NET editions of this book provide a good way to learn the language and the .NET framework, but they barely scrape the surface of modern game programming.

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