Foreword
I got my first computer in 1989, when I was 13. It was an Oric-1 with a 1-MHz CPU and 48k RAM. It didn’t come with any games, but when you switched it on, up came a screen that said:
Ready
It was ready to be programmed, and the manual dived straight into teaching me how to do this:
First the bad news. ORIC doesn’t understand English. But now the good news. You don’t have to learn a complicated electronic language, because ORIC speaks a language called BASIC. If your machine is switched on, we’ll see how easy this is. Type:
PRINT "HELLO"
and then press the [RETURN] key.
Wow! I just made my first program, and the computer did exactly what I told it to do. What a thrill! I was hooked.
A few years later, we upgraded to an Atari ST. This was better than the Oric in all ways but one: bigger, faster, higher resolution. When I switched it on, excited to start programming, I saw a desktop waiting for me to launch an application. Where was the programming language? I was horrified to learn I could not program this machine without first locating and buying an expensive third-party interpreter or compiler. If I had not already learned to program on the Oric, this hurdle would have been too steep, so I would never have bothered to program the Atari, never gotten a job in the games industry, never joined the XNA team, and would not be writing this foreword today.
Learning to program is important for many reasons. As a society, we need skilled programmers to create and maintain the programs that make the modern world work. As a democracy, we need people who understand computers well enough to make sure we control these programs, and not the other way around. And as individuals, programming can be great fun.
I worry that as computers have become more powerful, they also became more intimidating. I think the best thing about XNA Game Studio is how it restores the immediacy and fun I experienced with my Oric. To lower the barriers to entry, we have a free and easy-to-learn programming language called C#. To provide that magical thrill of making the machine do your bidding, we have powerful yet simple APIs, and the ability to run your creations not just on PC, but also Xbox 360 and Windows Phone. And last but not least, to learn how to put all these pieces together, we have books like this one. Nice work Dean and Tom!
I hope you have as much fun making games with XNA as I did with my Oric.
—Shawn Hargreaves, Principal Software Design Engineer, XNA Game Studio, Microsoft