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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

If you’re looking for a less mathy introduction to cryptography, and a more applied ressource, check the book Real-World Cryptography. It wrote it over the last two years and a half and it just got released on Amazon a few weeks ago.

It teaches you about the cryptographic constructions that you run into all the time as a dev (https/ssl/tls, encryption, hashing, etc.) and gives you pointers on how not to mess things up (and what libraries to use, etc.)

I also wrote a post a while back on why I was writing this book and why you should pick it up: https://www.cryptologie.net/article/504/why-im-writing-a-boo...

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Happy reader here, I enjoyed following along as it was written, and am now planning on reading it through as a whole.

I think the Bruce Schneiers Applied Cryptography is also really good. In fact it was written so that programmers would be able to implement algorithms from it.

Applied Cryptography is an excellent book, but it is very very old. Nearly 25 years old.

The foreword of the semi-recent (2015) "20th anniversary edition" (which appears to be a reissue of the 2nd edition) even recommends that you look for a more modern reference.

And one of the lessons of the last decades is that programmers should generally not be implementing their own cryptography unless that is their specialty.

Applied Cryptography is probably the worst book on cryptography engineering in broad circulation. It is a scourge.

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical-cry...

It's best to think of Applied Cryptography as an almanac or a work of pop science. The worst thing you can do with it is implement directly from it.

In the link I posted you can read my point of view on this:

> The other two somewhat respected resources at the time were Applied Cryptography and Cryptography Engineering (both from Schneier). But these books were starting to be quite outdated. Applied Cryptography spent 4 chapters on block ciphers, with a whole chapter on cipher modes of operation but none on authenticated encryption. Cryptography Engineering had a single mention of elliptic curve cryptography (in a footnote).

loved the book, thanks for writing it

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