Customer Reviews

Steel Bolt Hacking

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The book's intended purpose as stated is to sell lockpicking as a competitive sport, or club. While I agree with the message, several problems made the book very nearly unreadable, and left me wondering why I'd spent money on what is so obviously an amateur web-page in bound form.

As mentioned, much of the information is copy/pasted from one chapter to the next, up to and including diagrams and pictures, with no real reason for the repetition. I suppose the author might have wanted to illustrate how similar different types of locks are in function, but this is a poor way at best to do so. Additionally, numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes broke up whatever flow the book had, from the rapidly (and incorrectly) changing tenses in the author's anecdotes, to simpler mistakes such as 6this. [sic]

If you find this book used, it might be worth the price. Still, if you have any idea already how a lock works, you're better off searching the web for How-To's and FAQ's. It's obvious the author does know the material, and that's what makes me most upset about the book. If he'd bothered to hire an editor, or even a proofreader, he would have improved the book's quality immeasurably, and perhaps made it more saleable.

Very amateur printing and binding. Much of the information is repeated several times over verbatim... feels very much like the book was padded out to its length.

The "for computer people" angle is a red herring. The author simply comments - repeatedly - on the similarity between exploiting flaws in locks and exploiting flaws in computer security protocols. This is never explored or elaborated upon, nor is lock picking explored from a particularly computerish angle.

The information presented in the book is fairly clear, but there's very little of it. Furthermore, all of the information in the book is freely available - and better written - in several online guides.

Overall, I'm quite disappointed. Not worth the money.

This is not your average lockpicking tutorial and you'll find it to be useless unless you have a particular mindset. Written for the "computer hacker", Steel Bolt Hacking is a title meant for people with a curious mind who want to learn to pick locks for sport and fun, not nessicarilly for profit or occupation. This title approaches the subject from that of a computer user, drawing conclusions and connections that today's avid computer user can both understand and apply to practice.

First you have to realize that this is not a serious, in-depth lock picking book. It's a little handbook with about 100 pages. I've seen toaster manuals that were bigger. It will take you about 30 to 60 minutes to read through this book. Not only that, the production quality is horrible. From the formatting of pages to the author's writing style, everything about this book seems amateur. The author explains the subject of lock picking like he's trying to explain it to his friend, not like he's writing a serious text. I've seen FAQs and PDF files floating around on lock picking that were a hell of a lot better than this.

You'd think that in a compact 100 page book that has to cover a lot of ground the author will use every page to it's fullest. But the author keeps repeating himself so many times it becomes ridiculous. Sometimes the author writes the exact same paragraph using slightly different words and there are times he copies and pastes the exact same text! There's even a full page picture the author put twice for no apparent reason.

You might think that the author just didn't know better and forgot that he can just refer us to previous pages, but it's clear that he just tried to fill the book so it won't be even smaller. For example, there's a chapter on picking padlocks and then there's a chapter on picking deadbolt locks. It's essentially the same technique but sure enough the author repeats the whole chapter saying the same things all over again. Reading this book I got deja-vu feelings all the time. Also, why on earth did the author spend a whole page putting a table with all 100 combinations of HIS OWN SPECIFIC LOCK!

To sum it up, if you don't have experience with lock picking you will not learn how to pick locks from this book. If you do have experience, you don't need this book. I've seen better texts on lock picking floating around the Internet and you can surely learn more on the subject from just googling.

A dreadful book. Full of mispellings, technical confusion and repetition. This book 'might' show you how to pick your first simple tumbler lock, but the MIT guide is a better bet for both newbies and seasoned lock pickers - at least the MIT guide goes into more detail about tensioning which is critical for any successful pick.

Save your money on this amateur publication and download the free MIT guide.

And the guy that wrote the book isn't even a lock smith!

This is the first, and better of the three lock picking books that I bought. The book sums up what the other books I bought on lock picking did, as well as the MIT lock picking guide, but has the advantage of naming other resources, groups and where to go for more help. If you are beyond the basics, I wouldn't recommend this book, although I am still looking for an advanced lock picking book myself. I've even contacted a few locksmiths, but all were very bitter and completely indifferent to an amateur learning lock picking. Maybe I would too if it were my profession--but who cares.

I'll admit that I had a hard time with the math on cracking combination locks, but if you want a fast easy reading book to learn to pick locks, I would recommend getting this one to start with. The MIT guide is too basic and very old. My advice is; go to the authors website, www.thenetworkadministrator.com , because if you don't like his style of writing or are offended by his humor, than you're probably not going to like his book, but I do.

My name is Barry Chapman, and I approve of this message!

:-)

I had no previous experience with lockpicking, so in a sence I did actually learn something (=to open my pin-lock). That's what the book gets 1 star for. The same information is however also available for free on the Internet, just google for "lockpicking tutorial" or something similar.

Otherwise the book was a mess to read. It repeats itself over and over again (just to add up more pages to the otherwise thin book on a meager subject). It even shows the same one-page pictures twice. The books is apparently written i MS Word and printed out without checking what it looked like before making the final print. There are pages where the picture is on one page and the figure-text on the next page. There are even pages where the title for some chapter is at the end of one page when the chapter starts on the next page. Using photoshop to fix the b/w pictures would have also been an option, the author has apparently not heard of before.

There are so many small and big non-topic-related factors in this book that it disturbs the topic itself. And although, I'm not a native English speaker, I think I could have produced a far better book than this (even on the same topic, after having practiced lockpicking for about a week now).

Don't buy it!

Cool book. Was more impressed with learning how to crack combination locks than picking locks. In fact, I learn more from the authors computer website than I did in college.

Locksmiths have launch a private war against publications like this in an effort to protect their "secrets". This book is the most popular lock picking books in the world and is going to sell, regardless of the bad press from Locksmiths. The only lock picking secrets you can learn from locksmiths is; there is more money in drilling out locks than picking them.

Doug Chick presents a simple howto guide on lockpicking, which is nicely in depth enough to get the hacker started. Nice book! One has to keep in mind however that there is a 'zen' that has to be attained to pick locks. If you're relaxed, you'll have fun, and see just how vulnerable you really are. A must have for geeks.