Wow! My first Weber and I'm glad I finally gave this my full attention. This is truly excellent military sci-fi as hundreds of other reviews have already stated. The space battles and ground combat are equally engaging with the climactic dogfight at the end obviously taking the cake. It would be hard to depict the theoretical chaos and destruction of space combat as well as Weber does in the final chapters. These alone make the book worth the read, and that's to not even mention the political maneuverings and the early development of Honor's character in the first book of this series. 
 My biggest complaint was Weber's propensity to launch into multi-page info dumps I had no choice to skim through due to the incredibly dense content. Otherwise, really excellent stuff!