This section is necessary for both allowing some manner of brevity in the full impression segment, and defending the eventual conclusion of this review. This book is really more of an addition to his book ‘Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking’, than something stand-alone. Keep in mind how that impacts the page count.
The meat of the book begins at p.5 and ends at p.211. This means it spans 212 pages of content so far. First, we remove chapter 2, as it is a summary of ‘Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking’. This leaves us with 212 – (51-25) = 186 pages of novel content.
The first chapter loses 3 pages in images and one blank page, for a total of 4. (The rest has already been removed by starting the count at p.5.)
The third chapter loses 4 pages at the start, 12 pages throughout. Fourth loses 11,3 pages. Chapter 5 loses 13,4, chapter 6 10.3, chapter 7 loses 5.3 (which just so happens to be the best chapter, go figure – 3.3 if you don’t count the first two pages that show ‘Part 3’of the book), chapter 8 loses 4.6, chapter 9 loses 4.8.
This brings us to a generous estimate of 186 – 69,8 = 116,2 pages of novel, written content. This figure excludes direct quotations, unelaborated paraphrasing of other books, and repetition of content. (Would be closer to 95, if I were to give an estimate.)
But more important than any of this is the figure of novel information and content that hasn’t been done better elsewhere, which brings us to a very generous, rounded-up total of 20 pages of worthwhile content for an amateur social engineer. (Less for those who’ve read any book on non-verbal communication or deception before.) This is less than 10,000 words at its low word/page count (~400), or less than the expected total length of this review.
You will see how I got to this number in the next section. For now, it is important to remember that every book will have a similarly low fraction of its complete content be novel, however, very few books of this caliber, and definitely those by writers the likes of Hadnagy, have such a low amount of over-all utility. (Read the conclusion for my thoughts on why.)
For contrast, compare to it to ‘Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking’, which had more than 200 pages of worthwhile content when it was released (and still around that very same number today), and consider that it had a lot more words per page (I’d say around 525, or 25%+ more), and we’re left to conclude that ‘Unmasking The Social Engineer’ wouldn’t have been more than two short chapters when added to ‘Social Engineering: The art of Human Hacking.’
Continue Reading – [007] Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2