Re: recomendations for intro books

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Nate Sammons asks:

> can any of you give me some recomendations on introductory books
> on cryptography?
> 
> thanks,
> 

I like Gilles Brassard's "Modern Cryptology: A Tutorial," 1988,
Springer-Verlag, a small tutorial on _modern_ crypto, with discussions
of such applications as digital money, secret sharing, and the like.

The IEEE Press book, "Contemporary Cryptology," edited by Gus Simmons,
is also nice, with a lot of recent stuff. Good preparation for reading
the proceedings of the annual "Crypto" conferences.

(These proceedings are available in many technical bookstores--like
Computer Literacy, Staceys, and Stanford in the Bay Area--and in
well-equipped university libraries. The papers report on modern crypto
results and should be looked at by nearly all Cypherpunks.)

And then there are the standard textbooks: Denning, Meyer and Matyas,
Salomaa, Patterson, etc. These are all cited in nearly any one of the
books, are readily findable with a library card catalog, and are
frequently mentioned in sci.crypt.

My advice: spend a few hours at a good university library. The crypto
books (and journals--"Journal of Cryptology" and "Cryptologia") are in
the math section, usually with the call numbers around "QA76.9.A25."
Some crypto books, especially historical cryptography (like Kahn's
"The Codebreakers"), are found in Z103.

Spend time perusing these books and journals to get a feel for what's
happening. Crypto is a lot more than just PGP!

I hope this helps.

-Tim May

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