Sunday, August 21, 2011

New e-book: FRIENDLY F# with game development and XNA

I received a mail from Giuseppe Maggiore, one of the authors of a new book: FRIENDLY F# with game development and XNA. Giuseppe helped me put together the project templates for F# and XNA on the Xbox 360.

The main subject of the book is the F# language and its various
constructs, but every single chapter is centered around a game-related
problem. Each one of the first 5 chapters describes a problem, shows
and discusses its solution and then discusses in depth the F#
constructs used. The book has a (relatively rare) "problem-solution"
approach where everything is explained because of how well it works in
solving the problem, and not just "because". The 5 problems we present
are:
- a bouncing ball
- the Saturn V rocket
- an asteroid field
- a large asteroid field optimized with quad trees
- a police starship that must fight off a pirate ship attacking a
cargo freighter
In the last two chapters we use XNA to build a 2D and 3D renderer for
two of the samples we have seen. We show the basics of the SpriteBatch
class, the Model class, input management and audio with this powerful
framework. Basically, we cover the most important aspects of XNA in a
simple and succint way.
I had a quick look at the book and I think Giuseppe's description is a fair one. In other words, this is not a book primarily about game programming, but an introduction to F#. Although it touches some advanced topics such as custom workflows, it is not a comprehensive coverage of the language.
All in all, if you are looking for a gentle and quick introduction to the language, and you are interested in game programming, you should definitely check this book.

The book is available on Amazon and Smashwords.

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