Amazon Top 8 Cryptography Books
October 2002

1. Cryptography: A Very Short Introduction
Fred Piper & Sean Murphy
A clear and informative introduction to the science of codebreaking, explaining what algorithms do, how they are used, the risks associated with using them, and why governments should be concerned.

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2. Cryptography Decrypted
H.X. Mel, D. M. Baker 
A tutorial in digital cryptography, for readers at any level of experience. Requires no technical or mathematical expertise, but does include appendices for those who have it. Topics covered include public and private keys, hashes and message digests, cryptographic attacks, and digital signatures.

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3. The Code Book
Simon Singh 
People love secrets. Ever since the first word was written,
humans have sent coded messages to each other.
In The Code Book, Simon Singh, author of the bestselling
Fermat's Last Theorem, offers a peek into the world
of cryptography and codes, from ancient texts
through computer encryption.

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4. The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes
Mark Urban
"I am making haste to pass on the contents to 25. 13. 8. 9. 38. . . . who has ordered me to open communications with you." So reads a French dispatch captured by the British in the Peninsular Campaign against Napoleon's armies, causing the Duke of Wellington to comment, "The devil is in the French for numbers"-- and occasioning Mark Urban's intriguing study of code making and code breaking.

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5. Battle of Wits
Stephen Budiansky
Based on newly declassified documents, this is the first complete story of Allied code-breaking in World War II - the compelling tale of codebreaking's golden age. In 1939 cryptoanalysis was in its infancy, its practitioners' skills rudimentary and untried. The codebreakers faced huge barriers of official indifference and - from the military bureaucracy - even contempt for their work. Yet during the course of the war these men and women accomplished extraordinary feats of mathematical wizardry that turned the tide of many critical battles. Now Stephen Budiansky tells their story.

6. Science of Secrecy
Simon Singh
Secret codes are perennially, and universally, fascinating. Remember using lemon-juice to write invisible messages? What about the thrill of inventing your own private language? Something in the idea of occult information appeals to the 007 that lurks in every psyche. Author and TV producer Simon Singh has now taken this symptomatically human trait and turned it into a TV series tied in to this entertaining book.

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7. Codebreaker in the Far East
Alan Stripp
Codebreaker in the Far East is the first book to describe how Bletchley Park and its Indian and Far Eastern outposts broke a series of Japanese codes and cipher systems of dazzling variety and complexity. Their achievements made a major contribution to the Allied victory in Burma, and probably helped to shorten and win the war, perhaps by two or three years. Alan Stripp gives his first-hand account of the excitement of reading the enemy's mind, of working against the clock and the knowledge that they were facing an enemy who had never known defeat.

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8. Cryptography: Diffusing the Confusion
Simon J. Shepherd
While most books on cryptography assume extensive mathematical background, this book gives simpler explanations for factoring with elliptic curves and with false witnesses, mixed shift register sequences, finite automata, diophantine public key ciphers, feedforward sequences, spectral cryptanalysis, Ramanujan's partition functions, and cryptanalysis of the human genome. It offers self- contained, tutorial-style chapters with worked examples.

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