Beginners is the operative word in this title, and it is a rarer admission than you might expect. Most books in the territory assume a reader already deep in the process and struggling with it; Jordan M. Callahan starts further back, with someone approaching modern dating from the outside and wanting the map before the territory.
The personal development shelf is where our catalogue places the work, and three and a half hours confirms the intention. This is a primer rather than a programme: time enough to set out the landscape, the vocabulary and the common mistakes, without turning a straightforward subject into a course of study. Books that understand their own scope tend to be the more useful ones.