Book Review: Beginning .NET Game Programming in VB.NET

Let me get the full disclosure bit out of the way right up front: I was sent a free copy of this book by the publisher, I know two of the authors somewhat, and they mention this website in their references. That said, you can choose how large a grain of salt with which to take this review.

Frankly, I didn't think I was going to like Beginning .NET Game Programming in VB.NET. It's written in VB.NET (I'm a C# guy), it's a beginner's book, and most DirectX/gaming books suck. Fortunately, I was wrong.

I find that whenever I'm learning a technology, I generally want two books. I want to start with a good tutorial, and once I understand the basics, I want a good theory and reference book to help me explore in my own directions. Beginning .NET Game Programming in VB.NET makes absolutely no secret of the fact that it is very much the former, and not at all the latter. Frankly, had it tried to be a reference book, it probably would have failed, if for no other reason than that Tom Miller already wrote the best Managed DirectX reference/theory book.But David, Alexandre, and Ellen set out to write a tutorial work, and I think they did a pretty reasonable job.

The book starts off by writing a Tetris clone using only GDI+ (no DirectX), but builds up to a network multiplayer 3D game. Since the book is fairly short by computer text standards, it moves at a pretty good clip, presenting the material by writing and analyzing several different interesting games.

I'd have to say that this approach is the book's greatest strength: the fact that it is very much grounded in writing a game. That means it doesn't hand-wave over things like DirectPlay or DirectInput (although graphics does get the majority of the coverage). There's even some discussion of DirectDraw, which is fairly rare these days. And along with all the technology stuff, they constantly talk about the other factors for successful game development (e.g. “Source control is not optional” and “Write lots of small games first”). This is a goodness, as is the plethora of working game code.

The book isn't perfect, of course. I came across several errors, none too serious, that seemed to be largely related to the fact that much of the code in the book was ported from the C# companion work, which I haven't read. I also was a bit disappointed with the coverage of the issues around network play - I would have liked to have seen more discussion on this area. Still, it was arguably a good decision for them to cover less, not more.

Overall, I'd definitely recommend this book to anyone that had some VB.NET experience, and was interested in getting started with game programming.