I have been looking for a book like this, a VB.Net perspective

Overall I find this book good at what it advertises to be, a tour through the process of making a DirectX game in VB that would be very interesting and appealing to a novice programmer (teen). The game is a simplified 2d rpg/adventure game, called `Celtic Crusader'. While functional, in the interest of simplicity and time Then is still If-Then) except that you will need to recognize form events as such by their names instead of their handles keyword.

The DirectX8 for Visual Basic type library reference is still available with DirectX9.0c in VB.Net (just look under the Com tab when adding the reference) and seems to work fine in XP (I have tried it on 3 different machines.) I have not worked through the entire book yet, but so far I have not had any problems with compatibility.

This book is thinner than the typical programming book (tome) you normally find. It leads the reader directly through the creation of this adventure game, cutting out many side details as mentioned earlier. However, I find it delivers enough to create a decent working game, and a nice resource for a programmer looking for straightforward code examples.

It is a book about DirectX 8 you VB6 Basher

The VB6 basher above ignores that fact that VB6 isn't dead especially to those who already know it - did our compilers stop working when Microsoft stopped supporting it? Did they ever REALLY support it? Remember, VBA6 is still the core of Office 2003 and unless MS wants to break the entire financial industry it will be around for a long time.

If you know VB6 this book is a great way to quickly introduce you to DirectX and take advantage of its graphics capabilities. I could already program conventional apps in VB fairly well (newsreaders and such) as well as make API calls to do things VB won't do on its own but had never worked with Bitmaps and Sprites. If this sounds like you this book is just what you need to gain an understanding of 2D techniques. The book took me a weekend to finish and I had already begun extending his sample code before finishing chaper2.

Don't listen to cynical VB bigot amazon trolls. The book was worth the money.

-M

Learn VB and then Use This Book to Build a Game

There are quite a number of books on game programming. Most of these are on more advanced topics, covering the design of much more complex characters, much more complex games. Instead this book is aimed at the teen who has an interest in game programming.

It makes the presumption that you know at least the fundamentals of Visual Basic. What the author says is: Read the first couple of chapters. Try what the book says do, and if you're not lost you know enough. If you are lost, then go back and read one of the more introductory books on VB.

The emphasis here is to use the rather high level VB programming language and get a game created. This way the teen reader is made productive almost immediately and is much less likely to lose interest. The game being programmed is a 2-D Role Playing Game involving the invasion of England by Vikings. This is significantly less complex than a 3D game, but the resulting game is still fun to play.

Because of the need to know VB, this book has to be classed as intermediate level, but the game programming aspects are aimed at the beginner.