Introduction to Cryptography with Coding Theory

If more mathematics textbooks were written like this one, the number of mathematicians/scientists in the world would be much greater. The book is an absolute pleasure to read. The discoursive style makes what surely can be considered as a hard subject smooth and easily flowing. The subject is very well covered and the structure of the book is just fine, even for self-study. Algorithms, encryption methods, mathematical theorems are nicely and elegantly explained and no previous knowledge is necessary in any of the fields. At the end of many explanations or proofs I found myself stunned by the brevity and beauty of the argument. I enjoyed also the nice software support and exercise coming with the books.

I've read (or skimmed, as the case may be) some other writings on cryptography and none of them are really as clear as Trappe and Washington's book. Applied Cryptography comes somewhat close, but doesn't include enough math. Intro. to Cryptography with Coding Theory comes as close to the right balance between math and cryptography as possible. Right now, I'm taking one of Prof. Trappe's classes and I always am confident that if I feel I'm not going to remember the part of the lecture, I can easily refer to the book. The book is actually good enough to discourage me from taking notes and just pay attention instead. Not only that, but the code that's provided is offered in Maple, MATLAB, and Mathematica. Could you ask for more?

I was a newbie of cryptography area and I searched a lot of books before buying this. I found that most of them just explained topics which you can easyly find on the Internet. However I was looking for something which I could learn the mathematical backgound of cryptography without being a mathematician. This book explains everthing very simple. This book not only gives the explanation of RSA but it also explains required number theory for it and if you know a programming language you can code the algorithms and see what's happening. This is the book where you should start studying cryptography and after reading this, you can go further. BTW, I also recommend "A Friendly Introduction to Number Theory". With these two books I have my own cryptography library.

Knowing very little about cryptography when I started, I found this book taught me the fundamentals of cryptography with useful examples as it walked me through the material. In addition, it was a useful reference for applying this newfound knowledge to the actual practice in use today, especically on the internet. This book is a must-have for anyone needing an understanding of cryptography.