"Understanding Cryptography" provides a very good insight into modern cryptography. The major benefits of this book in my opinion are:
- it covers the major topics of modern cryptography, such as DES, AES, Public-Key cryptography, including RSA, ellicptiv curve cryptography, digital signatures, hash functions and message authentication codes
- it is mathematically precise and at the same time written in such a way, that it is well understandable. The clearity of the book is extended by many well-chosen and well-described examples and figures.
- the descriptions in the different chapters provide good information about the application of the cryptographic algorithms and additional interesting and helpful background information.
- the book has a well-defined clear structure
- in each chapter the learning goals are outlined and each chapter points out the "Lessons Learned".
- each chapter contains a section for discussion and further reading, that provides many beneficial references for more intenisve studies of a specific topic.
- each chapter contains a well elaborated section of problems in order to apply and train the presented schemes and algorithms.
- Furthermore the book is accompanied by a very informative web-site.
Due to these reasons, from my perspective an excellent book about modern cryptography that is well-suited for students, engineers and teaching staff.