I'm starting to feel guilty about getting ebooks for free from No Starch Press, but apparently they're happy to send them my way in exchange for a review, so I won't complain.
Anyway, I got a copy of the early access version Locksport - A Hacker’s Guide to Lockpicking, Impressioning, and Safe Cracking! It's obviously a book about lockpicking, but, as hinted by its name, from the sport angle.
I'm not completely clueless when it comes to picking locks, but I've always been mediocre at best, since I never really put the effort into practising anything but the basics. This was thus a great opportunity for a deeper dive! So I got myself a proper set of picks, 3 cutaway training locks one with serrated pins, with spool pins, and one with stupid chess pieces pins, and a couple of locks/padlocks from my local locksmith, and dove into the book!
I was a bit curious about its content, since I didn't bother reading the table of contents, and was expecting a pile of techniques to open wafer tumbler locks in the fastest way possible. But the book is so much more than that, with historical perspectives, a bit of legalese, the proper etiquette to participate in lockpicking competitions and how to organise one, anecdotes, mechanical details and resources for those who would like to know more, how to tear apart, modify, take care of, and reassemble locks, where to get equipment, how to impression keys, details on lever tumbler locks and vaults, …
The part about wafer locks, while interesting, doesn't really go much further than some basic techniques for entry-level security pins, but I guess practise is the only way to learn how to handle anything non-trivial anyway. On the other hand, the part about lever locks was highly entertaining, since those are really weird compared to the usual locks, and I didn't know much about them.
I recently gifted myself a Sparrow's challenge vault for my birthday,
and was thus highly delighted to discover that the book has a whole section
on safe manipulation; which is
fortunate since the instructions coming with the vault are pure garbage
confusing at best.
The only issue I had with the book is that while it's full of gorgeous colourful pictures, like the small marks left by pins during key impressioning, they are unfortunately barely legible on my Pocketbook InkPad 3, so I'd recommend getting the paperback version if you don't have a 𝖙𝖗𝖚𝖊𝖈𝖔𝖑𝖔𝖗 4𝖐 𝕳𝕯𝕽 e-reader.
All in all, it's a really great self-contained book for newcomers and beginners, entertaining, detailed, … and doing a tremendous job at making lockpicking competitions look cool yet accessible! It was also a nice motivation booster for me to tackle harder locks.
If you already know your way around locks, you might want to look at High-Security Mechanical Locks: An Encyclopedic Reference instead.