XNA is Microsoft's .NET-based easy game development software for Windows and 
  XBox.  I tried the o'reilly book and it was actually pretty poor for me. 
Obviously targeted at like first or second year college students. Not quite 
so bad that he teaches what an if statement means, but bad enough that he 
decides you don't need to know what a matrix is and just accept it as magic. 
He also explains in detail what each line of code does.

Then I found riemers.net which has some excellent tutorials. (The code 
listings are *just* broken enough that you have to have a basic 
understanding what he's talking about to fix it. ;-)

After going through those, I bought the two Apress books on XNA by him, and 
they're both excellent. Very thorough, detailed, and really expore a lot of 
the nooks and crannies you'd otherwise not know about, like how to customize 
the compilation chain to load your own objects.  He winds up doing some 
useful and pretty advanced stuff, like LOD calculations, loading animations 
into models, basic physics, random game maps, stuff like that. I'm only 
partway thru the "recipes" book, but it's already full of good stuff. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The question in today's corporate environment is not
   so much "what color is your parachute?" as it is
   "what color is your nose?"

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