I checked Amazon and there is a book called "The Code Book" by Singh. Is that the one? Because there is also a book called "The Codebreakers" by David Kahn. I need to know for sure because I haven't bought a computer book in at least three days. While we're at it, anyone read "Crypto" by Steven Levy? It gets good reviews. However, I thought he was the guy who wrote that fawning piece about M$ in Newsweek couple years ago. "M$ has the best software, M$ has the smartest people, if they don't they'll just hire the smartest people and then write the best software". Not an exact quote but you get the idea. If that's the same guy, you got to question his judgement. Paul "Austad, Jay" wrote: > > > For anyone who's interested in a nice discussion of the role > > of cryptography in history and a good description of public > > key cryptography I would recommend Simon Singh's "The > > Codebreakers." A very entertaining piece of geek writing. > > This is an *excellent* book. It runs through the history of different > ciphers and how to break them. Note that all 10 crypto challenges at the > end of the book were cracked last year. Singh also wrote Fermat's Enigma, > which is an excellent book on Fermat's Last Theorem. Interestingly enough, > the proof for Fermat's Enigma uses techniques that didn't exist back in > 1630, so fermat's proof (if he truly had one) was most certainly quite > different. If you're going on a book spree, get these two, you won't be > able to put them down. Singh makes otherwise dry topics quite interesting > reading. > > Jay ===== Paul Rech pauljrech at acm.org pauljrech at yahoo.com 651-430-9935 hm 651-246-6823 cell "The instructions said "Win95 or better required". So I installed Linux" __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email alerts & NEW webcam video instant messaging with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com