The Code Book

The secreet History of Codes & Code-breaking

Paperback, 402 pages

English language

Published Feb. 17, 2000 by Fourth Estate Limited.

ISBN:
978-0-00-763574-0
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OCLC Number:
52534625

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5 stars (8 reviews)

In his first book since the bestselling Fermat's Enigma, Simon Singh offers the first sweeping history of encryption, tracing its evolution and revealing the dramatic effects codes have had on wars, nations, and individual lives. From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logisitical breakthrough that made Internet commerce secure, The Code Book tells the story of the most powerful intellectual weapon ever known: secrecy.

Throughout the text are clear technical and mathematical explanations, and portraits of the remarkable personalities who wrote and broke the world's most difficult codes. Accessible, compelling, and remarkably far-reaching, this book will forever alter your view of history and what drives it. It will also make you wonder how private that e-mail you just sent really is.

32 editions

Both a fascinating history and accessible primer

5 stars

One thing that's missing in the teaching of computer science is history (think Ada) and there's no better example than the history cryptography, with famous ciphers going back to Caesar. It just gets juicer over the centuries, with the technical that details that normally might deaden your attention span plainly explained by the author. And now I think I have a handle on quantum cryptography. But as another review here noted, this book was published a few decades ago, so what have I missed?