I want to start learning how to make games in XNA, but I have no idea where to start! If someone could advise me on what pieces of software I need and some good books or tutorials to look at, that would be most helpful.
As for my current coding knowledge, I have some good experience with Javascript (in conjunction with HTML5 canvas). I'm pretty sure I would also need to learn C# to code with XNA, so keep that in mind.
If you understand the general programming fundamentals work - datatypes, classes, functions, etc - I would say go for it.
When I started learning C#, I did have games in mind, but started with developing console apps that, while they looked very basic, incorporated some advanced C# techniques, in order to better my understanding of the language.
Once you have an understanding of how C# works, I'd go ahead and download the XNA studio from here - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=23714
You will want to start with learning SpriteBatch. Some good tutorials can be found here...
From there you can start experimenting with pixel shaders (on SpriteBatch, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb313868(v=xnagamestudio.31).aspx ), and also matrix transformations ( http://www.david-amador.com/2009/10/xna-camera-2d-with-zoom-and-rotation/ ).
Once you have a good grasp of that, you can finally move on to using the graphics device to draw primitives and models using BasicEffects and custom shaders.
Good luck!
A great resource that helped me learn XNA was the set of tutorials here.
Step one would be to download both the framework (XNA) and MS's Visual C# 2010 Express. I have found a couple of books. Learning XNA 4.0 published by O'rielly and XNA Game Studio 4.0 Programming...just plug those into Amazon. For C# I rather enjoyed the Head First series but you may need a more academic tome to supplement that.
Also XNA RPG tutorial thing has been enjoyable.
If you don't already have Visual Studio, the quickest way to get started would be to get Visual Studio C# Express and a copy of XNA. Both are free and downloadable from Microsoft.
Once you've done that, all you have to do is decide if you want to jump right in or play around with some tutorials first. If the latter, I highly recommend Riemer's tutorials. and I'm certain others can and will recommend other good resources.
Just learn XNA with the C#, the XBOX 360 is really only a particular profile from a programmer viewpoint.
there are a lot of tutorial on the internet but this is an official resource.
I recently got into basic game development with XNA as well. The Microsoft Dev Network has a great tutorial, that will take you through step by step in setting up a basic space shooter.
I would highly recommend going through the tutorial, as that will give you a good understanding of the rudiments behind game development. Don't worry about the amount of time you're putting into it (the tutorial claimed it would only take about 90 mins, but I took over a day going through all of the code), but understanding all of the concepts they're covering is vital!
I started the same thing over the summer and found that the official site to help a lot.
http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/tutorial/2dgame/design
You can even just adapt a tutorial or two and get a pretty sweet game.
The starting point for XNA dev is create.msdn.com although that's now just a landing page to take you to the XBOX live indie games page.
The education catalog is pretty complete and lets you filter by dev area, it's actually a really good resource.
