Welcome to the second installment of #TripwireBookClub, where we look at Serious Cryptography, published by No Starch Press. This was a book I was interested in because I don’t spend a lot of time digging into crypto these days, and the book seemed like a good dive into the topic.

Serious Cryptography: A Practical Introduction to Modern Encryption by Jean-Philippe Aumasson looks to provide a complete dive into cryptography for both beginners and experts. The book is broken down into four parts – Fundamentals, Symmetric Crypto, Asymmetric Crypto, and Applications.

A quick Google search for JP Aumasson reveals that he’s an expert in this field and incredibly qualified to write this book. One of the things that tends to hold true for tech books is that reading them from cover to cover can sometimes be draining. This held true with this book, as I occasionally found myself waking up with the book on my chest when I tried to read the book sequentially. While I wanted to learn more about cryptography, it’s definitely a dry subject that requires substantial focus. The fact that the chapters were self-contained and the parts of the book were broken down during the introduction allowed me to more easily jump around and read the portions of the book I was interested in when I was interested in reading them. Given the nature of the material, if the book had just built on itself and required start-to-finish reading, it’s unlikely I would have finished, so I have to commend the author for going the direction that he did.

Here’s what others who read the book with me had to say:

Jean-Philippe Aumasson’s book Serious Cryptography goes into detail explaining how certain aspects of cryptography works. His chapters allowed the readers to figure out how (Read more...)