Cryptography: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Series) Book

I'll get to straight to the point. This book isn't really for beginners or laymen. The first couple chapters were illuminating, interesting, and understandable. But if you've never had any exposure to cryptography (especially the technical terms and acronyms/abbreviations), the last half of this book will be completely unintelligible to you. I was disappointed.

I'll start with the good stuff though. The basics of cryptography as well as the descriptions and explanations of various ciphers throughout history were really well explained and interesting. And the explanation of binary calculations at the beginning of the book was excellent too! At the very end of the book, there are some notes of resources (including websites) for furthers reading. That's cool too.

My main complaint is that things started to get complicated after the third chapter, and each acronym is defined exactly once. All the abbreviations seemed to be introduced at the same time. It was overwhelming. So I still understand nothing about cryptography and its algorithms as they're used practically today. I consider myself a persistent, thoughtful reader, and I have a light computer science background, but I couldn't make sense of hardly anything after the descriptions of basic ciphers.

I think this book is best for people with a strong computer science background who already know a thing or two about security. If you're completely new to cryptography and cyber security, you can still enjoy parts of this book, but it isn't an all-around good introduction.

What I got out of this book:
*Cryptography isn't about keeping outsiders from getting sensitive info, it's about making sure they can't understand what they see.
*The goal isn't always to make a system as secure as possible - just "secure enough".
*"Perfect secrecy" is when the number of messages and chances of guessing correctly are equal (the number of messages and number of keys are equal).
*Prime numbers are important in contemporary cyber security.
*An understanding of basic ciphers (e.g. the Caesar Cipher, homophonic coding, polyalphabetic coding, the Vernam Cipher)
*An understanding of binary calculations