[kbhomes]

I had this same textbook for the Crypto course I just completed this semester. It's a very good textbook, in my opinion, as the descriptions and examples are really informative. Usually if I couldn't get the material through my professor's lectures, it was sufficient to look it up in the book. However, we did only briefly touch on cryptographic hashes and only a little on Legendre and Jacobi symbols, and not at all on the elliptic curve and other special topics towards the end of the text, so I can't comment on those.

The book does very good job of talking about different algorithms and concepts, often times with a very brief historical introduction, and includes thorough descriptions of various popular/important attacks of those concepts. In general it's a book I'd recommend for an introduction to cryptography. You also learn a fair introductory bit of number theory which I really enjoyed.

I also met Dr. Washington, one of the co-authors of this book, who was a very pleasant and energetic person who really enjoys the topic of cryptography.

By the way, where are you taking this course?

[milhous]

Thanks everyone for their reviews. Glad to hear this isn't a POS text.

I'm taking this at Millersville University as a once-a-week, 3 hour evening course. I'm a Physics and CS major, and am taking it as an elective to get a Math minor.

With all the NSA and crypto news these days, it sounds like a great time to learn about the fundamentals of crypto. And I'm curious if there will be actual programming involved because to my knowledge, there aren't any prereqs for it, not even an intro to programming course.