Viewing Single Post From: How Much Of Cytographic History Can You Believe?

Viewing Single Post From: How Much Of Cytographic History Can You Believe?
Donald	Dec 21 2006, 06:48 AM
Elite member Posts: 454 Group: Trusted Member Member #8 Joined: September 2, 2005	The reviewer is correct, Singh is not as accurate, and certainly not as thorough as Kahn. However, I think he's overestimated the importance of the errors. Let's compare it to, say, "The Davinci Code". Cryptographers no run into people all the time who THINK they learned something about cryptography from that book, but now have bad information about the very basics of crypto, such as what is a Caesar cipher. This is BAD for cryptography. But I have yet to see anyone posting on Sci.crypt (or here) with factual errors that they picked up from Singh. that's because any mistakes Singh made were in the rather esoteric areas of cryptography and its history, not in the basics. Thats why I still recommend "The Code Book" as an excellent introduction to cryptography for the general population. It manages to make Crypto and it's history exciting and gets across most of the important concepts. People who take further interest then need to move on to Kahn. But even those who don't will have BETTER information about Crypto from reading "The Code Book" than they had before. And any mistakes they make because they got it out of Singh will probably be drowned out by the mistakes they make because they just forgot details or got confused.


How Much Of Cytographic History Can You Believe? · Debates