Free XNA Book

LearnXNA - XNA Book All Chapters

"XNA Book
By Mike Fleischauer

Chapter one is about XNA in general, what you need to get started and explains what the initial templates give you.  Finally, I explain what pieces you need to get started on your way towards game programming.

Chapter two is about basic 2D graphics.  I walk through how to draw graphics to the screen, the basics behind 2D graphics and finally how to create transparent sprites.

Chapter three we are going to learn the basics of controlling our games. We cover simple keyboard, mouse and gamepad interaction. This is also where you are going to have to make your first hard decision about how your game is going to play.

Chapter four, we are going to learn the basic of music and sound effects. We cover the use of the Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool (wow, that’s a mouth full). Then we learn how to take the files generated by this tool to play sounds and music in our game programmatically." [Description leached in full]

Even though it's a ways away we've already assigned my son his Summer Project, design and build a simple XNA game for both a PC and our XBox.

His first step is to learn to program in C# and mine is to learn XNA (with a side helping of C# learning)...

The above XNA book from LearnXNA looks like a good starting point for me. In total it's 76 pages, with just enough pictures to make the given point and focused code snips (i.e. no/little generated code). It's well written, in a conversational style, the PDF's are printable and the price is perfect...

(via Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson - XNA Links)