This novel is much more obscure and difficult to find than are the more celebrated Dumas novels such as The Count of Monte Cristo and the Musketeer novels. While it is certainly the work of Dumas, with his inimitable style and engrossing characters, it is much more a history than a Romantic novel. He frequently spends chapters upon chapters describing which army did what to whom and for how long, not that it mattered because God was protecting France. It is not a bad read, but it is a bit dry if you are not as interested in serious history as in the tales the author habitually spins.

To sum it up in a single word: simple. This book is far too simple to provide any real useful information. Don't waste your time on this one.

I've gotten about halfway through this book in the past two weeks and I feel like I'm learning enough where I can start writing my own simple games once I'm done with it. I started from knowing VB.net pretty well (for business apps), but not knowing the first thing about DirectX or Game Programming. That said, the editing of the code samples in this book is atrocious. The code samples in the book almost never match those on the CD and you have to figure out "what they mean" most of the time, debugging stuff yourself. Another dumb thing is that whoever wrote the code doesn't know how to use arrays, and always Dims a 4 element array as MyArray(4) instead of (3). Lastly, they don't tell you to enable "key preview" on your forms, so if you didn't know to do that from reading it in another .Net book, the keyboard handler functions would never work for you. Bottom line is that this book can help you learn elementary game programming in VB.net, as long as you know the language reasonably well (decent VB6 would be enough), and you won't get too frustrated trying to reconcile the code in the book and on the CD. It's too bad: If they had gotten their act together, this could have been a 5 star book.

I just started reading this, so I gave it a middle grade - I'll either move it to 5 or to 1 after I'm done. My brother and I are actually planing a game programming face off. He is using the "C# and Game Programming" book and I'm of course using this book and VB. The plan is to write the same game and see which runs faster.

The only reason this novel had Dumas as its author was because it was signed so. Nowadays, very little (if any) evidence suggests that he was actually the author. At any rate this novel, which deals with a dumb but honest and strong hero while portraying Aramis (who was obviously the only one of the musketeers alive at the time) as the Evil Personified, is among the worst novels I have ever read untill the end.

Alexandre Dumas n'a pas ecrit le livre" the son of porthos" mais PAUL MAHALIN(ecrivan français) Ce livre est une suite du livre"Viconte de Bragelone" de Dumas et le livre raconte la vie du fils de porthos et de Aramis(le dernier mousquetaire vivant) Pour les lecteurs qui ont aimé le viconte de bragelone je doit conseiller le livre

I am a classical fencing student and a fan of the works of Alexandre Dumas. I was really excited when I found out that he had written this book. Unfortunately, the story has nothing to do with fencing and everything to do with Russian history and architecture. The protagonist happens to be a fencing master, but that's all. If you're actually looking to read a novel about a fencing master, I would suggest Master at Arms by Rafael Sabatini.