Solid (and heavy)

I have the Sixth Edition. Yes, it is 3000+ pages and is printed on wafer thin paper.

The content is excellent for security professionals, particularly those at the management level. There are 220+ articles within the 10 (ISC)2 domains on a wide variety of topics. Most of the stuff is higher level but just technical enough for you to have confidence in the concepts presented. It would probably be typical that you'd read an article in here for one of three reasons: background research for an immediate decision that doesn't require detailed technical knowledge; introduction to concepts that will require further in-depth research; or research for a presentation to senior management, in which case you'd have to distill and simplify conceptually (something you're probably already used to).

You will find multiple articles on single topics- some more complete than others, and potentially with a variety of perspectives, so you'll have to make your own calls on what's presented. It's not a "InfoSec Management for Dummies" book that will give you easy answers to your problem or a step-by-step "how to implement an InfoSec program" guide; it's more like an encyclopedia for research that you can use to factor into making your own, independent decisions. For example, there's not a lot of specifics on actual risk assessment techniques, but there are high level articles on the principles.

I wish each of the individual articles were specifically dated so I'd know the time context; seeing a statement like "the position of CISO was virtually unheard of five years ago" or even "80 percent of companies monitor their employees' email" means less without knowing when the article was written.

I could probably find a lot of similar information Googling for it, but Google doesn't seem to be what it once was (or the Internet for that matter... so much for the days of shared research) and my time is too valuable to spend a lot of it culling through blogs, noisy forums, and marketing junk disguised as whitepapers to get this information.

For the record, I have passed the CISSP exam. I did not use this book, nor would I recommend it as a study guide. I bought this particular book because I needed it as a reference for my work. If you mastered this book cover to cover and didn't read anything else, you'd probably do OK on the exam, but there are far more efficient means to getting there.

Other Reviews

• Major disappointment! Terrible
• Good try
• An absolute "must-have" for information security professionals
• too thick
• Solid (and heavy)