After writing this book, I sat back and reflected on the process I've been through during the past six months. The first question that came to my mind was, "What on earth drove me to sit down and write something like this in the first place?" The first part of the answer to that question would be my mom, Sheree. No, my mother wasn't asking me to write a book; instead, her influence in this area came long before that. When I was pretty young, my brother and I became hooked on the original King's Quest game. Mom came to our rescue countless times, because even though we had twenty fingers between the two of us, we were too young to type the word "swim" before Sir Graham would drown in the waters around the Kingdom of Daventry. The King's Quest series instilled in me a love for gaming and computers in general that has dramatically shaped the direction of my life ever since. Thanks for keeping me afloat, Mom.
The other part of the answer lies with the hundreds of students who've taken my DirectX and XNA graphics courses at Neumont University. From Brett Beardall's purposefully annoying, "Aaaaarrrrroooonnnn, I have a quessssttttiioooonn" voice to Ryan Abreus' unhealthy obsession with unicorns (yeah, don't ask), you all are the reason I have developed such enthusiasm for XNA. Thank you!
Beyond simply writing the book, my next question was, "How was it possible for me, somebody whose lengthiest writing was a four-page essay on economics in college, to write something this large in scale?" The answer to that question is easy. I had a lot of help. Let's face it, this book would have been pretty boring and lame and cluttered with incorrect and poorly written code if I had done all of this myself. Luckily, I had a ton of assistance from people far smarter than myself.
Laurel Ruma from O'Reilly was there the entire way, helping me with all of my questions and walking me through this process. Marlowe Shaeffer was a huge boost from the beginning, getting me started on the right path. Sumita Mukherji was a patient and fantastic production editor.
Andy Dunn, Brian Keller, and Chris Williams have been phenomenal through this entire process. Each of them has been an extremely valuable resource in terms of XNA as well as writing style and accuracy. This book is much better because of their help. Stephanie Reiman on the XNA team at Microsoft was also very helpful.
Adrian Wolfgang Meyers created the images used in the 2D section of this book. William Howard Brown and Joseph Irizarry were also very helpful in developing some initial code for the networking chapter of the book.
You all rock! Thank you so much!
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