Building XNA 2.0 Games: A Practical Guide for Independent Game Development (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

Like others here, I noticed this book doesn't really cover a whole lot of XNA; there are much better books for that. If you want to get into serious Xbox programming you'll need a good sized book collection anyway though; just one book won't make you into a master. What this book does do is walk you through a big, easy-to-understand tutorial so you can make your own 2D game for Xbox (like a platform game or fighting game). It uses plain and sometimes funny language that anyone can understand and it assumes you know nothing about XNA, C#, or Visual Studio (but a little bit about programming). This book is also actually very good for learning generic programming principles such as how to create an animated character editor, map editor, AI system, and particle system. I bought a used copy on Amazon for about two bucks and it was more than worth the price.