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Understanding Cryptography: A Textbook for Students and Practitioners

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I used the book "Understanding Cryptography" as text book for a basic course in cryptography. It is execellent structured, compact and clearly written and reaches the goal to be "Understandable". It offers a basic course, but it opens many possibilities to deepen the content and to explain the mathematical background. It fills a gap of well known cryptographic bestsellers, which are too detailled for a basic course. It is suitable also for engineers and students, who want to learn actual cryptography by self study. It contains the cryptographic mechanisms and algorithms, which are (or should be) used today (2010), for example presenting Elliptic Curve Cryptography not as an exotic cryptography, but as state of the art. Thanks to the authors, also for the well designed exercises.

"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.

This book has a clear structure - I lifts you from ancient cryptography systems over AES, RSA to elliptic curve cryptography. All major topics are raised, also the mathematical aspects. Well suited from beginner up to intermediate level.