Reddit mentions of The Code Book : The Secret History of Codes and Code-Breaking

Only seems to be a massive problem in North America really. For my math undergrad masters in the UK (4 years), the stuff we were required to buy was really cheap and only for extremely specialised modules. For general calculus or whatever, they wrote their own notes with their own worksheets/coursework that could be accessed online.

The only textbooks I own are the four books that I was required to buy (for about £80 total over four years), textbooks I bought willingly after I decided to do my PhD, and textbooks I bought during my PhD. Looking at my bookshelf, I have eight books that were voluntary purchases/presents, and four required ones. The required textbooks were:

Hyperbolic Geometry (Jim Anderson) (fourth year Hyperbolic Geometry masters module);

Introducing Einstein's General Relativity (Ray D'Inverno) (third year GR module, also useful for advanced GR/gravitational waves in fourth year);

Complex Functions (Jones and Singerman) (fourth year Complex Function Theory masters module);

The Code Book by Simon Singh (first year Number Theory and Cryptography module).

The first three were all written by lecturers from my university and the code book is a fantastic cheap read regardless of course requirements. The GR book was the most expensive, but at the end of each year they would buy back the books from students who didn't want it after the course was over so that they could sell it second hand to next year's students for about half the price.

Edit: In this context, required means "required because you need to self study some stuff and we are generally following this book, so it would be really, REALLY fucking helpful". Some people never bought any.

It's not so much about CS in general, it's more focused on encryption, but The Code Book by Simon Singh is a big recommendation - unlike the impenetrable tomes of many other CS books, It was easy to read and I learnt a fair amount about encryption. It goes into the history of encryption as well. In fact, it starts at the earliest examples of encryption we know of and builds up to modern day and potential future encryption techniques, which I thought was pretty cool.

If you like a lot of the really theoretical stuff (abstract logic, is a problem solvable, ect) you might like Logicomix. It's about the life of Bertrand Russel, his work, and the lives and works of his peers. It's a graphic novel, and it's a story, rather than just "a book about stuff", if you know what I mean. It's not entirely accurate, sometimes changing events that happened for the purpose of making a better story, but they address everything that they changed in the appendix, which was nice of them. Some (not me) would argue that it's more about maths than CS, but I certainly really enjoyed reading it and it's definitely relevant to CS.

Neither of these books are about CS per se, but both of them should be pretty relevant to anyone with an interest in CS - and both of them were good books in their own right.

My favourite book for beginners is The Code Book by Simon Singh

Un libro che appare banale ma non lo è, pur restando sul divulgativo è sulla storia della crittografia

più o meno perché spiega molto bene come funzionano gli algoritmi asimmetrici e RSA in particolare.

Edit: fix missing words

After reading his book on The Simpsons, the writers and their desire to hide math jokes in episodes, I picked this one up recently

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1857028899/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_j7E1Bb2BWH0AT

If you're interested by this, I recommend the Code Book: The secret history of codes and code breaking by Simon Singh It's a brilliant read, taking you from the early ciphers all the way up to modern public key encryption, and the future of encryptions, and explains quite simply how each of the ciphers and codes work. Just finished it, which is where I learnt about this factoid regarding Poland and ENIGMA.

Unfortunately, the Enigma was still classified in the 70-80's (!), because after the war the Brits gave Enigma ciphers to their "allies" so that they could read their secret communications. Actually, some parts of the Enigma breaking were only declassified in 2012, meaning that other parts might still be classified and hence "covered up" with historical inaccuracies.

This means that books, history and otherwise, about WW2 written up to the 80's still mention the "false" facts (like the radar thing, but also other things like "the super ability of some military leader in the middle east" - whose name and exact story eludes me at the moment)

Hence, even today there is a lot of misconceptions about various historical "facts", as someone might cite a history book written in the 70s (or cite a history book citing a history book from the 70s), and hence get part of the cover-up rather than the truth.

Personally, I learned this from the book the code book

I dont have a degree is computer science, so parhaps you do know better than me, :-D

However, I was under the impression that SSL 256 had been broken using some obscure MIM attack vector which messed with time codes. Perhaps I have it mixed with another encryption.

But my original point is to say that stating modern encryption is unbreakable is a naive point to make. You will know that almost every level of encryption has at some point had that statement made against it until a new way to crack it appears overnight.

I read a great book which you might want to read: The Code Book by Simon Singh Linky!