Ask HN: best ways to learn about cryptography
My main field is web development. But I don't stop there : I play with mobile app development, with system toolkits like gtk or qt, I've built server accepting connections in C, even read about the basics of creating OS and programming languages. I'm currently learning 3d modeling, in the hope to buy a 3d printer, and look with interest toward project like arduino and raspberry PI.
I've never read anything about cryptography.
My first thought about cryptography is : "well, that's something especially difficult and that carries a lot of responsibilities". So what ? So is playing with memory in C (both difficult and may easily create vulnerabilities). That's a good reason not to release anything while unprepared, but not a good reason to know nothing in this field.
I suspect I'm far from being the only one is that case : we do not care that much about cryptography, and that's a problem. That's a problem because if we swarmed the world with cryptography discussions and toy projects - just like we do with other fields - we could expect new ideas to appear a lot more quickly, and have a lot of alternative where we're all just use ssl nowadays in most of our applications.
There are reference resources about almost anything on the web. I just can find any clear reference about cryptography. Does anyone have good advice on how to start ?