The laundromat I go to most Sundays is a few blocks from a huge secondhand bookstore with an exhaustive tech section, and I have a weakness for acquiring these things . . why not? At $10 - $15 a pop used they are a great value, and to me there's nothing more inspiring than a heavy Tome of Knowledge that offers the promise of answers to any question you have . . . once you know enough to learn what questions to ask!
A big secondary project to the platformer I'm tooling around with is to forge through all the example code in the XNA book, entering it myself by hand. I've already managed to get a triangle onscreen which the book assures me is in 3D, although at this point I'll have to take its word for it. This book jumps into the deep end fast, and if I hadn't started with a bunch of the more hand-holding internet tutorials I would probably be lost already, or at least more lost.
The C# book is interesting, it starts out with a broad overview of game programming concepts, then gets really crunchy into using DirectX for graphics. The book pre-dates XNA and covers a lot of stuff that it looks like you don't really have to do anymore, but I think it will be a good resource for looking "under the hood" at how XNA is handling graphics.
The third book is sky-high abstraction, covering even subjects like how to decide who to hire for your game development team, how to run postmortems, all kinds of good stuff. This one I'll probably read straight through kind of slowly over the course of several weeks.
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