The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

The Code Book is a delightful treatment of the subject of cryptography. It is a nice combination of history, science, warfare and politics.The author uses interesting historical events as background to narrate the different phases of what might be called the mainstream developments of cryptography and cryptanalysis. It is a captivating presentation.The book started off with the story of Queen Mary of Scotland, and went on to cover the Caesar cipher, Vigenère cipher, the famous Enigma, the super-secret Colossus, and the modern day computer based encryption and decryption developments. The author also threw in a couple of interesting "sideline" stories, such as the Beale cipher, the Rosetta Stone, and the Navajo "code talkers" who played a key role in the Pacific theater during WWII.My teenage son used to complain that most of the difficult subjects he learned in school would never have any use in real life. I gave him a copy of this book. The book is a compelling story of how science, engineering, mathematics, computer, linguistics, psychology are all critical pieces of this all-important game.There are more technical treatises on this subject, and there are more lengthy and nuanced historical accounts on military intelligence as well. But this book is undoubtedly the best introduction to this uniquely fascinating subject.

I have always been fascinated by codes and Singh has put together a comprehensive book on the history of codes. Having read many books on codes, Singh was still able to enthrall me with some historical stories that I had not come across. It's not just technical stuff, but is written with the novice in mind as well. But the book holds enough technical information to keep the enthusiast interested as well. The version I bought has a crypt contest in the back, which I enjoyed working on - I was only able to solve the first 3 or so puzzles, but it was a lot of fun.

The Code Book, Simon Singh's introduction to the race between cryptologists and cryptanalists, code-makers and code-breakers, is probably one of the most pleasant popular science reads of the year.The first chapter starts with the description of the monoalphabetic substitution ciphers, its failure and the consequence of the latter, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. From then we proceed to polyalphabetic ciphers, the Vigenere Cipher and the Babbage's method of breaking it; as an added bonus Singh has thrown in the three Beale papers, allegedly leading to over a ton of gold buried in the hills of Virginia. The third chapter describes the path Germans made between the world wars, from the Zimmerman note disaster to the construction of Enigma. Closely related to it is the next chapter, a story about the Poles and the Brits cracking Enigma.The fifth chapter is a step aside: on deciphering texts that are not purposely encrypted, but simply written in extinct languages and scripts, like Egyptian hieroglyphics or Minoan Linear B script. From then on, we are probably already on the more familiar territory; the discovery and re-discovery of public key cryptography, and its application in Phil Zimmerman's PGP. The last chapter tries to provide a peek into the future: quantum computers that can break currently uncrackable codes in linear time, and quantum encryption, which cannot be broken without violating the laws of physics.Apart from the Beale treasure papers, Singh added another gem for aspiring cryptanalists: they can test what they have learned with ten ciphertexts in the appendix, and the author promised to pay 10.000 GBP to the first one who solves all of them. And Singh proved to be a good teacher: to date, nine stages out of ten are solved already (the last one involves a massive amount of CPU time).True, David Kahn's Codebreakers contains a more exhaustive treatment of the historic development of cryptography, and Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography will provide you with a knowledge needed by a working specialist. However, if you share just a casual interest in the area, this is the book for you. It's much more than just stories about people involved in the cryptography and other related trivia - you will be surprised that Singh's lucid explanations will actually make you understand how the algorithms work.

Mr. Singh traces the history of cryptography from its recorded inception in roman times up through current applications. While all of the chapters held my interest it was Mr. Singh's work in chapters 4 through 6 that I feel deserve particular note. Chapter 4 deals with the war effort at Bletchley Park and the work on the Engima machine. Here Mr.Singh adds an additional dimension by providing some insight into the work of Alan Turning, the development of Colossus, the first (now reported) electronic programmable computer and the unrecognized cryptanalysts who broke Ultra and the other codes of WWII. Chapter 6 brings us up to present day cryptographic issues from RSA and PGP to philosophical issues of personal privacy in modern society with web centric commerce and online book reviews. At each step in the process Singh successfully combines the elements of a technical treatise with a human values and features. For those wanting to go a little further under the hood and look at the processes and algorithms in some of the codes mentioned in the text, several appendices at the end of the book should fill that yearning. I found the book informative and enjoyable to read.

Before Singh's "Code Book" came on the scene, the only other book I knew about is Kahn's "Codebreakers". I don't have the time to read such a large text as Kahn's book, so I was very pleased when this book became available.Singh has done a very nice job of demonstrating how deep an impact cryptography has on history. He opens the book by recounting Mary Queen of Scots' conspiracy to have Queen Elizabeth murdered and how she attempted to use encryption to cloak her intentions. It was a very exciting way to open the book.Singh has found the right combination of technical detail, historical detail, and character development.Singh's explanation of how the German WWII Enigma functioned is exceptional. He made it very easy (and fun) to understand.Singh's last chapter is also very neat on the subject of quantum cryptography. Though I have a BS in computer science, I'm no physics genius and Singh did a nice job of making (what I consider) difficult physics concepts easy to understand and of showing how they can be applied to modern cryptography.Although I don't know a thing about "Fermat's last theorem", I've been so pleased with Singh's writing style that I'm considering reading that book also just to see what it is all about.If you like codes/ciphers and want to read about their impact on history without reading a thousand pages then get this book. You'll be happy you did.